The San Juan de Dios Hospital is part of the history of medicine in Colombia, but it is also a landmark of Bogotá. From its beginnings, when it worked on donated land during the Colonial era, he always worked with a single purpose: attend to the health of citizens.
In 1564 he arrived in Santafé de Bogotá Bishop Fray Juan de los Barrioswho donated land for the construction of a health center intended to welcome and heal the poorboth Spanish and native. His first name was Saint Peter’s Hospital and had a high user demand.
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Given the clamor of the citizens for the construction of a hospital with greater demand, the Jesús, María y José Hospital emerged in the place where it is located today Saint John of God Churchthe new building was built thanks to a royal certificate issued by King Philip V in May 1723.
In 1735, this new hospital would take its current name, Saint John of Godfour years later it began to operate with a better infrastructure to meet user demand. The San Juan de Dios had three sources of funding: the budget of the Spanish Crown, donations from the wealthy of the time and derived resources of productive land.
The time of prosperity
In its first years of operation, the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God took charge of running the hospital. By the year 1869, the Charity of Cundinamarcawhich was left in charge of the administration of the hospital.
In the 19th century the San Juan de Dios received a large number of wounded product of the civil wars of the time. However, he had a breakthrough for Colombian medicine thanks to the influence of its graduates in Francewho implemented the first medical specialties.
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For the twentieth century, the president Rafael Reyes Prieto ordered the transfer of the San Juan de Dios Hospital to a plot of land located at the Hortua Mill, where it would settle definitively. In 1910 he began construction of a new building on this site, which began operating in the 1920s.
From there, the great heyday of the hospital begansupported by the medical guidance of the Faculty of Medicine of the National Universitywhich basically made it the only university hospital in Bogotá.
On the other hand, it became in a major research center for medicine. It was there that the doctor Manuel Elkin Patarroyotogether with a group of neonates from the Maternal and Child Hospital, created the first malaria vaccinethe first synthetic vaccine in the world.
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Why was it closed?
At the end of the 1990s, a financial crisis began that coincided with the implementation of Law 100 of 1993this led to the San Juan de Dios was declared unfeasible financially, which led to its intervention and subsequent closure in 2001.
The closure of the hospital produced incidentally a serious labor crisisin which today several of its employees the full settlement has not been recognized and the corresponding credits. In 2002, the Congress of the Republic issued Law 735for which the San Juan de Dios and its neighbor, the Maternal and Child Hospital, were declared Historical and Cultural Heritage of the Nation.