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Featured Article Of The Week
Alberta Hospital Edmonton
In the spring of 1923, with crowding becoming a deeper problem at the Hospital for the Insane in Ponoka, it was decided to make the facility a mental hospital for adults. It was to become a home for, in the parlance of the time, the chronically insane. Its first patients were 47 First World War veterans, transferred from the Hospital for Returned Soldiers in Red Deer.
While the original facility contained several buildings, today just Building No. 1 survives. This three-story brick and stucco structure ranks as one of the few remaining buildings of its type in the province. Its cruciform 2,200 square metre layout with crenelated roof line, front bay windows and arched oak vestibule with terrazzo flooring shows influences of the English Jacobethan Revival Style. The style is characterized by its multi-paned windows, shaped parapet, hipped roof and bay windows. Early on, the basement contained a dining room and school room, there was a day room on the main floor, dormitory rooms and the main and second floors and staff bedrooms in the attic. There were 15 staff in those days, overseen by Dr. David Dick, the facility's medical superintendent.
In her history of the institution, writer Sheila Abercrombie notes that Dick was a military doctor who had served in the First World War and had headed two military hospitals. Dicks organization and operation of the institute was exceedingly military in style, with a strict hierarchy of authority, rigid rules and routines, tight schedules, and a Spartan environment. Click here for more...
