Massachusetts General Hospital

From the upper:
The Bulfinch Building as it appeared in 1941, including the Ether Dome.
The Bulfinch Building: State of the Art from the Start.

Founded in 1811,[3] the original hospital was designed by the famous American architect Charles Bulfinch.[7] It is the third-oldest general hospital in the United States; only Pennsylvania Hospital (1751) and NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital's predecessor New York Hospital (1771) are older.[3] John Warren, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at Harvard Medical School, spearheaded the move of the medical school to Boston. Warren's son, John Collins Warren, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh Medical School, along with James Jackson, led the efforts to start the Massachusetts General Hospital, which was initially proposed in 1810 by Rev. John Bartlett, the Chaplain of the Almshouse in Boston. Because all those who had sufficient money were cared for at home, Massachusetts General Hospital, like most hospitals that were founded in the 19th century, was intended to care for the poor.[8] A 30-year-old sailor was the first patient admitted to the hospital on September 3, 1821.[9] During the mid-to-late 19th century, Harvard Medical School was located adjacent to Massachusetts General Hospital.

Walter J. Dodd established the radiology department at the hospital. From just after the discovery of x-rays in 1895, until his early death in 1916 from metastatic cancer caused by multiple radiation cancers he oversaw the radiology department. He also underwent over 50 surgical procedures at the hospital to treat his radiation injuries, from skin grafts to amputations.[10]

The first American hospital social workers were based in the hospital.[11]

The hospital's work with developing specialized computer software systems for medical use in the 1960s led to the development of the MUMPS programming language, which stands for "Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System," an important programming language and database system heavily used in medical applications such as patient records and billing. A major patient database system called File Manager, which was developed by the Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans' Affairs), was created using this language.

Early use of anesthesia

Monument in Boston commemorating Morton's demonstration of ether's anesthetic use

It was in the Ether Dome of MGH in October 1846,[7] that a local dentist, William Thomas Green Morton, was invited to perform a public demonstration of the administration of inhaled ether to produce insensibility to pain during surgery.[7] Several years prior, Dr. Crawford Long of Danielsville, Georgia had given ether for surgery, but his work was unknown outside Georgia until he published his experience in 1849. On 16 October 1846, after administration of ether by Morton, MGH Chief of Surgery, John Collins Warren, painlessly removed a tumor from the neck of a local printer, Edward Gilbert Abbott.[7] Upon completion of the procedure, which was without screaming or restraint, the usually skeptical Warren reportedly quipped, "Gentlemen, this is no humbug." News of this "anesthesia" invention rapidly traveled within months around the world.[12]

A reenactment of the Ether Dome event was painted in 2000 by artists Warren and Lucia Prosperi. They used the then-MGH staff to pose as their counterparts from 1846.[13] The Ether Dome still exists[7] and is open to the public.

An anesthesia department was established at the MGH in 1936 under the leadership of Henry Knowles Beecher.

The main MGH campus is located at 55 Fruit Street in Boston, Massachusetts. It has expanded into an area formerly known as the West End, adjacent to the Charles River and Beacon Hill. The hospital handles around 1.5 million outpatient visits each year at its main campus, as well as its seven satellite facilities in Boston at Back Bay, Charlestown, Chelsea, Everett, Revere, Waltham and Danvers. With more than 25,000 employees, the hospital is the largest non-governmental employer in Boston.[18]

The hospital has 1,011 beds and admits around 50,000 patients each year.[5] The surgical staff performs over 34,000 operations yearly.[19] The obstetrics service handles over 3,800 births each year.[20] The Massachusetts General Hospital Trauma Center is the oldest and largest American College of Surgeons-verified Level One Trauma Center in New England,[21] evaluating and treating over 2600 trauma patients per year.[22] Architect Hisham N. Ashkouri, working in conjunction with Hoskins Scott Taylor and Partners, provided the space designs and schematics for the pediatrics, neonatal intensive care, and in-patient related floors, as well as the third-floor surgical suites and support facilities. In the fall of 2004, the Yawkey Center for Outpatient Care (named for Jean R. Yawkey) opened. This 380,000-square-foot (35,000 m²) ten-floor facility is the largest and most comprehensive outpatient building in New England.[23] In 2011, the Lunder Building, a 530,000 square foot, 14-floor building opened. The building houses three floors of operating rooms, an expanded emergency room, radiation oncology suites, inpatient neurology and neurosurgery floors, and inpatient oncology floors; all of which increase the inpatient capacity by 150 beds.

Massachusetts General Hospital for Children
Partners Healthcare
Organisation
Funding	Non-profit hospital
Type	Children's hospital
Affiliated university	Harvard Medical School
Services
Emergency department	Level 1 Pediatric Trauma Center
History
Former name(s)	Children's Health Service
Links
Website	https://www.massgeneral.org/children/

Massachusetts General Hospital for Children (MGHfC) is a pediatric acute care children's teaching hospital located in Boston, Massachusetts. The hospital has an estimated 100 pediatric beds[24] and is affiliated the Harvard Medical School.[25] The hospital is a member of Partners Healthcare and is the only children's hospital in the network. The hospital provides comprehensive pediatric specialties and subspecialties to infants, children, teens, and young adults aged 0–21[26][27] throughout Boston and the wider Massachusetts. Massachusetts General Hospital for Children also sometimes treats adults that require pediatric care.[28] Massachusetts General Hospital for Children also features the only ACS verified Level 1 Adult and Pediatric Trauma Center in the state.[29] The hospital is directly attached to Massachusetts General Hospital and near the Ronald Mcdonald House of New England.[30]

The hospital has an American Academy of Pediatrics verified level III neonatal intensive care unit that has a capacity of 18 bassinets.[31] The hospital also has a 14 bed pediatric intensive care unit for critical pediatric patients age 0-21.[32]

Massachusetts General Hospital conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States, with an annual research budget of over $1 billion[34] in 2019. The hospital received the 10th most funding from the National Institutes of Health in 2018,[35] with ~$500 million going to support 959 awards. The Mass General Research Institute was launched in 2015 as a formalized way to support promote and guide research at Massachusetts General Hospital. Research at Mass General takes place in over 30 departments, centers, and institutes across the hospital. The hospital is home to fundamental research labs investigating the basic building blocks of life as well as a clinical research program with approximately 1,200 active clinical trials. The hospital has six thematic research centers:

• The Center for Systems Biology
• The Center for Regenerative Medicine
• The Center for Genomic Medicine
• The Wellman Center for Photomedicine
• The Center for Computational and Integrative Biology
• The Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard

Notable scientists at MGH include Jack Szostak, PhD, 2009 Nobel Prize Winner in Physiology or Medicine,[36] Rakesh Jain, PhD, a 2015 recipient of the National Medal of Science,[37] and Gary Ruvkun, PhD, winner of the 2014 Wolf Prize in Medicine,[38] the 2014 Gruber Prize in Genetics[39] and the 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.[40] In 2019, 55 scientists from MGH were listed in Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science annual Highly Cited Researchers Report. [41] There are 23 MGH researchers in the National Academy of Medicine (some are listed under their Harvard Medical School affiliation),[42] and four MGH researchers in the National Academy of Sciences.[43]

Notable medications that have resulted from research at Mass General include:

The closest MBTA stop to the main campus is Charles/MGH on the Red Line. On March 27, 2007, the new Charles/MGH station was opened with new renovations, including handicap accessible elevators.[44] There are five main food service areas for the general public on the MGH campus. They include the Eat Street Cafe in the lower level of the Ellison Building, the Blossom Street Cafe in the Cox lobby, Coffee Central in the White lobby, Tea Leaves and Coffee Beans in the Wang Ambulatory Care Center, and Coffee South in the Yawkey outpatient center.

The hospital offers a global second opinion service in cooperation with Grand Rounds.[45]

Massachusetts General Hospital is affiliated with Harvard Medical School and is its original teaching hospital. Together they form an academic health science center. In February 2009, the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Institute of immunology was founded to bolster research into creating vaccines and other therapies for acquired immune system conditions, chiefly AIDS. It was made possible by a $100 million gift over ten years, and represents the largest single donation made to MGH.[46]

The Recovery Research Institute was created in 2013 by Dr. John F. Kelly, the first ever endowed professor of Addiction Medicine at Harvard Medical School[47]. The institute is a part of the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Psychiatry[48] and published the National Recovery Study, the first-ever nationally representative study on the number of Americans in recovery from alcohol or other drug use[49]. The institute also created the Addictionary, the first ever glossary of addiction-related terms and a system for stigmatized terminology alerts [50][51][52].

MGH is affiliated with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute through Dana-Farber/Partners Cancer Care and the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center.[35] They are also affiliated with Project Pinball Charity. In 2015, MGH Home Base Program became a founding partner of the Warrior Care Network health system focused on treating posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans, along with partners Emory Healthcare, Rush University Medical Center, UCLA Health and Wounded Warrior Project.[53][54]

Though it has its own chief of psychiatry and top-ranking department, MGH is closely affiliated with nearby McLean Hospital, a psychiatric hospital also affiliated with Harvard Medical School.[55]

A former MGH physician filed a lawsuit under seal in May 2015 alleging that at least five orthopedic surgeons endangered patient safety by keeping them under anesthesia longer than necessary while the surgeons performed simultaneous surgeries. Dr. Lisa Wollman refiled the lawsuit in June 2017, citing concerns that the hospital was driven by economic benefit and keeping patients unaware of the practice of concurrent surgeries. Wollman's attorney claimed that Medicare and Medicaid were being defrauded because they require that the surgeons must be present for all "critical portions" of the surgery in order to be compensated.[60]

The hospital released a statement defending the use of overlapping surgeries: "The MGH continues to believe that its practices comply with all applicable laws and regulations, and the hospital will defend the claims accordingly."[60]

The records of those involved in research studies at Massachusetts General Hospital were affected in an incident that exposed their names, diagnoses, and tests.

In a June 2019 incident that was reported in August, approximately 10,000 patients, who were participating in research studies at MGH, had their names, dates of birth, diagnoses, tests, medical record numbers, and medical histories exposed in a data breach by "An unauthorized third party".[61]

• Massachusetts General Hospital Academy
• Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Academy
• MGH Institute of Health Professions[62]

• Proto (magazine)
• Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Massachusetts General Hospital.

• History of MGH
• ARCADD, Inc.
• Historical photos
• MGH at Doctoralia USA