For many of us, the name Woodbridge, after the Woodbridge Hospital, is synonymous with insanity or mental illnesses because of its association with the Institute of Mental Health. So what was the Social Hygiene Hospital synonymous with?
If you are wondering what or where the Social Hygiene Hospital was, it was also known as the Middle Road Hospital. So why would people snigger if you said that you had to go to the Social Hygiene Hospital? Jerome has the answer:
The hospital became the Middle Road Hospital after the war in 1945, and was referred to by a rather antiquated sounding name, the Social Hygiene Hospital. During the 1970s, I remember my parents would refer to the hospital as a “skin hospital” – it was a centre for the treatment of skin diseases. Along with skin diseases, the hospital was notorious as the centre for treatment of venereal diseases (VD), which we now referred to commonly as STDs or sexually transmitted diseases.
Jerome writes more about the Middle Road Hospital here, in the streets of the Mahallah that was not also associated with the Jews, but the Japanese as well.
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