Malaysia’s first hospital, Taiping Hospital (1880)

Taiping has been described as the “Town of Firsts”. The list is long and includes the first railway, which ran from Taiping to Port Weld for the transport of tin; the first public gardens and first zoo; the first museum, Perak Museum; the first prison, the first airport; the first newspapers in English and Malay, as well as the first hospital established in 1880.

Taiping General Hospital was the first, but by the end of the 19th century Perak had seventeen hospitals each controlled and maintained by the Government. Each was under the overall supervision of its medical officers consisting of the State Surgeon, three Senior District Surgeons, seven District Surgeons and two Vetinary Surgeons.

According to historian H.A Cartwright, quoting from the Government’s State records, in 1906 the State of Perak treated 27,178 patients and 50,345 out-patients, and of those admitted to hospital 14% died. The most prevalent disease was malarial fever which often caused other fatal diseases such as dysentery, followed by beriberi (caused by malnutrition), pulmonary and venereal diseases.

Taiping General Hospital, the first hospital in the Malay peninsula, was originally established by the Chinese tin-mining community to care for its workers called the Yeng Wah Hospital, although hospitals had been operating in Singapore from the 1840s.

Originally known as the Chinese Pauper Hospital it was taken over by the Government in 1880 and moved to new premises at its current location in Main Road, financed jointly by the Government and Chinese donors, and renamed the Taiping General Hospital. Attached to the hospital was a “lunatic asylum”, and nearby was built the Prison and Police Hospital in Taiping Prison.

C.W.Harrison, who wrote a guidebook on the Malay States in the 1900s, visited the hospital gardens and described the “flotsam and jetsam” as he put it, congregating there:

“One of the sights of Taiping is the gardens of the hospital near the railway station. In these gardens is collected a strange collection of human wreckage, for amongst its palms are a hospital, lunatic asylums for men and women, a refuge for decrepits and blind men, and a leper ward. Here is assembled the waste of the alien economic system, thrust out, past service from the mines, the towns and the plantations, to be picked, cared for and perhaps cured by the doctors. There are very few Malays in these institutions, for they at all times prefer to be ill in their homes.”

The Government soon became concerned at the high costs associated with running the hospital and decided to introduce measures to defray the costs including a fifty cent annual fee for each patient, and a $1 tax levied on each resident of Taiping. However, both levies were abandoned after a few years because the Chinese workers were often unable to pay, and the tax was very unpopular and was avoided on the grounds it was not payable in other States.

During the 1880s Taiping Hospital underwent major enlargement with the construction of new wards and other buildings, and had over 900 patients. Further, in an attempt to improve the health of the area’s residents and to reduce outbreaks of water borne diseases, the Government established a Sanitary Board which was responsible for street cleaning, waste disposal and so on, and introduced vaccination programs. Whilst these measures may have reduced the prevalence of certain diseases it did little to reduce the high rate of infant mortality in the State which represented 20% of all deaths due to general lack of parental knowledge and lack of midwives.

Another first for Taiping was, allegedly, the first use of an x-ray machine in South East Asia which had been invented by Willhelm Rontgen in 1895. According to the report in the Straits Times of 16th February, 1897 (which can read here) a Mr. Wray, Chairman of the Perak Amateur Photographic Society, demonstrated to an audience the first creation of an x-ray image which was that of a fish and showed its bones, following which he did the same to the hand of a man who had been injured in a cricket match. No doubt this must have caused some excitement in the audience, and the newspaper reported that: “The resulting picture fully answered the expectations. It is understood that the hospital in Perak will shortly be provided with Roentgen apparatus.”