Aldershot Military Hospital

Aldershot Military Hospital is a name given to up to three hospitals in Aldershot, Hampshire, which served the various British army camps there.

The hospital was founded sometime after the Crimean War, during which the military medical services had been found to be less than adequate by Florence Nightingale. Three separate hospitals were built over time and served separate areas in the military encampment.

The first hospital was a wooden hutted structure, near the Garrison Church for lunatics and infectious diseases, as well as providing some family accommodataion. The Union Hospital, converted out of a private residence which had been transformed into a workhouse, the Union Poor House, came next. It was small, but for the time, well-equipped.

It was replaced by the Cambridge Hospital named after the head of the British Army and son of George III. In the First World War, it was the first base hospital to receive casualties directly from the Western Front.

The Cambridge was also the first place where plastic surgery was performed in the British Empire. Captain Gillies (later Sir Harold Gillies), met Morestin, while he was on leave in Paris in 1915, who was reconstructing faces in the Val-de-Grace Hospital in Paris. He fell in love with the work, and at the end of 1915 was sent back from France to start a Plastic Unit in the Cambridge Hospital. It soon moved out to Roehampton

After the Second World War, with the decline in importance of Britain's military commitments, civilians were admitted to the hospital, but the hospital pioneered the supply of portable operating theatres and supplies for frontline duties. The hospital also contained the Army Chest Unit.

It was closed partly due to the increasing disadvantages of the old building.

References

[http://www.rushmoor.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=1209 History of Cambridge Military Hospital]