Hospital de São José

The building that today houses São José Hospital was ordered built starting in 1579, under the patronage of Cardinal Henry of Portugal, to house the College of Saint Anthony the Great (Colégio de Santo Antão), an important Jesuit-run educational institution that was up until then located in the Mouraria quarter. The college was transferred to this new building on 8 November 1593.

On 1 November 1755, a large-scale earthquake followed by a tsunami and a firestorm destroyed much of the Lisbon downtown, where the central Royal Hospital of All Saints was located. The hospital was greatly damaged, and the surviving patients were provisionally housed in undamaged convents and palaces until such a time the hospital was rebuilt.

It was around this time that tensions between the Portuguese crown and the Jesuits came to an all-time high after King Joseph I's chief minister, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo (later, and today best known as, the Marquis of Pombal), implicated them in the Távora affair. In 1759, the Jesuits were expelled from Portugal and its dominions, and the Portuguese crown seized their assets — among them, the College of Saint Anthony the Great.

Due to financial constraints, All Saints' Royal Hospital was never fully rebuilt. Following the nationalisation of the old and now vacant Jesuit College, the hospital facilities were transferred there, and it received its first patients on 3 April 1775;[1] the old hospital was finally demolished to make way for a new square, Praça da Figueira, and the new repurposed premises were christened Saint Joseph's Royal Hospital (Hospital Real de São José), paying homage to King Joseph I.

Not unlike All Saints' Hospital before it, Saint Joseph's was the country's greatest school of surgery. In 1825, King John VI created the Royal School of Surgery (Escola Régia de Cirurgia), which would later evolve into the Lisbon Medical-Surgical School following Passos Manuel's reforms in 1836.[2]

In 1844, Saint Joseph's Hospital annexes the first of what would become long list of hospitals, the nearby Leper Hospital of Saint Lazarus (Gafaria de São Lázaro). Not long after, the Rilhafoles Mental Asylum (some time later renamed Miguel Bombarda Hospital) and the Desterro Hospital also became institutionally attached to Saint Joseph's — the beginnings of an hospital centre that was then called, collectively, "Saint Joseph's Hospital and Annexes" (Hospital de São José e Anexos). Other hospitals within the city also merged into the centre: Hospital de Dona Estefânia in 1877, Hospital de Arroios in 1892, Hospital de Santa Marta in 1903, Hospital de Curry Cabral in 1906, Hospital de Santo António dos Capuchos in 1928.[2] From 1913, the hospital center became known as the "Civil Hospitals of Lisbon" (Hospitais Civis de Lisboa, HCL); it is currently called the Central Lisbon University Hospital Centre (Centro Hospitalar Universitário de Lisboa Central, CHULC).

• Official site