Colțea Hospital

When an earthquake shattered Colțea Hospital in 1802, Bucharest did not abandon its first hospital. It rebuilt it. Then rebuilt it again. Founded in 1704 by Mihai Cantacuzino as a charitable hospital for the poor, Colțea became the starting point for much of the city’s medical history.

Bucharest’s first surgical school opened here in 1842. Separate medicine and surgery departments followed in 1859, then an ophthalmology department in 1863. Soldiers wounded during the 1877 War of Independence were treated at Colțea, as were victims of the 1989 revolution more than a century later. A memorial cross outside now commemorates those killed during the uprising.

The Romanian Society of Surgery was established in the hospital’s amphitheatre in 1898 and returned there for meetings in 2013, completing a 115-year circle. More than three centuries after admitting its first patients, Colțea remains a functioning municipal hospital. Its buildings have fallen, changed and risen again. The institution has proved considerably harder to destroy.