Prominent hospital that has served city for a century

One hundred years ago this week, a new local landmark building was opened by royalty. Eugene Byrne looks at the story of the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital, with a little help from a new booklet about its history.

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ON February 15 1915, Captain Robert Bruce Melville Wills of the 2nd Wessex Field Company, Royal Engineers (TF) was killed in action while trying to save a wounded fellow-officer. If the press reports can be believed, he was killed instantaneously by a single bullet.

It was just one of the millions of intimate tragedies which devastated families across the world during the Great War. The fact that he came from the wealthy Wills tobacco dynasty wouldn't have made the grief of his parents, Walter Melville Wills (1861-1941) and Louisa Gertrude Wills (1863-1936) any less raw.

The only crumb of consolation they could take from it was that they had the money to ensure his memory lived on.

Well, up to a point. It's probably the case that nowadays perhaps one Bristolian in 100 - and maybe fewer - can put his name to the building erected in his memory.

This was the Homeopathic (or Homoeopathic, or in the usual spelling of the time, Homœopathic) Hospital, a Bath Stone edifice on St Michael's Hill which is looking pretty good for its century of wear and tear (and a couple of bombs.)

It would also be one of three landmark buildings which opened in Bristol in 1925 which were designed by the architect Sir George Oatley and paid for by members of the Wills family from the immense profits generated by the city's tobacco industry.

The other two were St Monica's and Bristol University’s Wills Memorial building, of which BT will of course have more to say in the coming weeks.

Despite its name, the new medical facility would turn out to be a very well funded and meticulously planned modern hospital which featured the latest medical technology and which would offer conventional ("allopathic") treatment and surgery as well as homeopathic remedies.