Mayo Hospital

● Formerly known as: Calcutta Native Hospital

● Opened in: 1792

● According to the British Journal of Ophthalmology, “Calcutta Native Hospital appears to have been the first institution (in Bengal) to provide scientific treatment for diseases of the eye”.

Calcutta Medical College and Hospital has chosen Mayo Hospital on Strand Road for its second campus, breathing life into the comatose facility after over 20 years.

“The formal order will be issued soon. We will decide later whether the new facility should continue to be called Mayo or be known as the second Medical College and Hospital campus,” director of medical education S.N. Banerjee said on Friday.

The College Street institution, Asia’s first medical college, was set up in 1835. Mayo, in its earliest avatar, was even older (see box). The British used it to treat “natives” afflicted with cholera or malaria. Like many Calcutta institutions that have rotted over the years, Mayo, spread over five acres on the banks of the Hooghly, less than a kilometre from Howrah bridge, stood as a symbol of a bygone era.

Its younger cousin, stretched by dearth of space and a daily deluge of patients, now promises to rescue Mayo.

The medical college now has 2,300 beds but doctors admit that around 30 per cent of the patients who turn up every day are referred elsewhere because of the lack of beds. The college has 155 MBBS seats, but the number of students is set to go up by several hundred over the next few years. Health department officials said it would have been impossible to expand within the College Street campus.

The Mayo Hospital facility will initially have 300 beds. Its five-storey building, abandoned and dilapidated, is now being renovated by the CMDA.

Several outpatient departments of the medical college would be spread across the ground and first floors of Mayo Hospital. “These will be in addition to the existing ones on our main campus,” said principal Utpal Dutta.

The second floor will have a dialysis unit while the next two will house the indoor departments of medicine, general surgery, gynaecology and paediatrics.

The very factor that had kept private hospitals away from Mayo apparently made it suitable for the expansion plan — location. It is barely 3km from the campus, meeting the Medical Council of India’s stipulation that campuses be within 5km of each other.

Efforts to revive Mayo Hospital with private help had failed. The health department had approached Wockhardt and Apollo, but in vain.“Although the infrastructure is good, the location was a constraint,” said a senior official of a private institute.