Where 275 years of medical history come to life

“For people to have any interest in history, it needs to be told as a story.”

Stacey Peeples, the curator and lead archivist at Pennsylvania Hospital, has spent decades bringing stories to life for visitors and scholars who come to learn about medical history at the nation’s first chartered hospital.

This spring, stories spanning 275 years of medical history are now being told through interactive exhibits, restored clinical rooms, and original artifacts, curated by Peeples and developed into public museum exhibits in partnership with exhibit design consultant HealyKohler.

The transformation of the hospital’s original Pine Building into a museum opens opportunity to share memories of the past and for future generations to carry those stories forward.

“If we were to only have dates and names, people may gloss over that,” Peeples said. “We want people to remember our history.”

People may already know that Pennsylvania Hospital is the oldest chartered hospital in the United States, established in 1751, or that Founding Father Benjamin Franklin was involved in its creation, “but there’s so much they don’t know,” said Pennsylvania Hospital CEO Alicia Gresham. “We’re this hidden gem, and we want to share our story with the world.”

The Pine Building has evolved over time—the east and west wing hospital wards are now offices—but its Great Court has stayed true to its original appearance. When a fresh coat of paint is needed, it’s based on a traditional colonial color palette: “We stay within the same family of colors that have always been here,” said Peeples.

Paperwork and manuscripts in the hospital’s archives allude to the Great Court’s function as an administrative space. Now, the Pennsylvania Hospital museum displays some of these contents, including admission slips and casebook records, along with a matron’s log. This book of informal records has been like an excavation site for Peeples and her team of volunteers. It’s an active project, unearthing the names of individuals from the earliest days of the hospital who could have been lost to history. These included many women and staff from a wide range of racial and ethnic backgrounds. There were bricklayers and groundskeepers hired for construction, and cooks who bought butter and mutton for the hospital staff.

“It’s an artifact we can always relate to,” Peeples said. “All roles are important—it takes every single person to keep a hospital going.”

Among its myriad of “firsts,” Pennsylvania Hospital had the first associated Apothecary facility, located on the first floor of the Great Court. The apothecary, or pharmacist, would prepare medicines from plants for patient care.

The Apothecary workspace comprised a large marble slab for concocting the medicines, shelves packed with glass bottles of medicinal ingredients, and a multitude of drawers for storing items like herbs, tools, and tinctures.

In the early 20th century, the workspace transitioned into an administrative office, and in the late 1990s was converted to a conference room. The museum has restored the room to its initial design as an Apothecary.

Visitors can step into the role of the apothecary through the museum’s interactive exhibits—to not just read about its history, but to engage and be a part of it.

“I find that the best museums engage all the senses,” said Gresham. “The visuals are stunning, but we also have audio and hands-on activities.”

There are 75 drawers that visitors can open in the workspace to uncover pharmaceutical curios, like glass bottles and tins donated by a former physician’s family, and pharmacy “trading cards” with illustrations and descriptions of products once sold.

At one point in time, the apothecary was tasked with meteorological records. Although it’s unknown why a pharmacist would be assigned to keep these records, this unusual artifact is on display within the Apothecary space in the museum.

The record book—one of several volumes—gives tidbits of what life was like in Philadelphia from 1824 until 1922—the weather each day, which flowers were in bloom, along with other notable forecasts. “It was a splendid aurora borealis,” one recordkeeper wrote in 1859. These records also describe historical and cultural events, including ice skating on the Schuylkill, Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession through the city, and ships getting stuck in the frozen Delaware River.

Medical “firsts” are not exclusively at Pennsylvania Hospital—they are celebrated throughout Penn Medicine as a whole. Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine is the nation’s first medical school, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania was the first teaching hospital associated with a medical school, and Penn scientists have pioneered numerous revolutionary biomedical firsts including the first FDA-approved cell and gene therapies and the technology behind the first mRNA vaccines.

Pennsylvania Hospital has achieved national and global recognition for the Penn Medicine Center for Transfusion-Free Medicine—one of the few programs of its kind in the country, offering surgical care and advanced treatments like stem cell transplants without the use of donated blood products. At the museum, visitors can open a door and hear audio from the center’s medical director, Patricia Ford, MD, speaking about its leading care for bloodless medicine.

“Pennsylvania Hospital is a jewel in the crown of Penn Medicine,” said Gresham. The museum’s gallery focused on remarkable firsts “shows where we started and how we continue to innovate today.”

Pennsylvania Hospital was a pioneer of treating mental illnesses at a time when behavioral health was not understood like physical illness. Physician Thomas Story Kirkbride, who led the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital in the mid-1800s, practiced “moral treatment,” a practice that valued daily activity over confined or restrained care. The Institute replicated a home environment to allow for an easier transition back to patients’ homes. One approach was using a “magic lantern”—an early slide projector lit by candles that presented photographs of faraway places around the world and local sites around Philadelphia. The artifact, on display in a Pennsylvania Hospital museum gallery focused on mental health, was designed to be a reward for patient cooperation, as opposed to the “punishment” ideology of earlier centuries.

The hospital’s longstanding history in maternal health, and Penn Medicine’s ongoing innovations, are also a point of pride. Pennsylvania Hospital was the first U.S. hospital to deliver a baby in 1765. Flash forward—maternity care teams at the hospital now deliver more than 5,000 babies annually and continue to advance women’s health. In 1983, the hospital had its first in-vitro fertilization pregnancy, and in 2019, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania had its first birth from Penn Medicine’s uterus transplant clinical trial. At the museum, visitors can hear audio from present-day physicians that detail these medical marvels.

“A baby born in a hospital was cutting-edge at the time,” Gresham said. “Now we’re doing uterine transplants to help families carry and deliver babies. How amazing is that?”

From 1824 to 1835, Pennsylvania Hospital’s historic library was a temporary maternity ward. There are anatomical plaster casts of pregnant patients, originally created in the 1750s in London for medical education, on display at the museum as a nod to this history. But what the library is most known for is its colossal collection of medical texts, some dating back to the 16th century.

A bibliophile’s dream, the library is a dark-paneled room with thousands of books from floor to ceiling. “Some say it reminds them of Beauty and the Beast,” Peeples said. “They’re in awe and want to go through the whole collection.” Museum visitors can peruse the botanical and anatomical illustrations in reproductions of rare books; the original books on the shelves can be accessed by researchers upon request.

Completed in 1804, Pennsylvania Hospital’s surgical amphitheater was once a gathering space for aspiring doctors to observe operations, from tumor removals to limb amputations, all before the widespread use of anesthesia. Antique stethoscopes and surgical instruments, typically delicately stored in velvet-lined boxes in the archives, are on display in the amphitheater space at the museum.

Visitors can channel the role of the surgeon at the gallery’s anatomage table. This virtual touchscreen allows visitors to examine a life-size, digital rendering of a human body and its organ systems, replicating where patients would have received their surgeries, located in the center of the circular, multi-tiered room.

With the hospital’s nearly 300 years of history, the museum only shows a fraction of its archives, said Peeples, who plans to swap artifacts in the future to give returning guests a different experience. “We are never going to run out of things to talk about. It gives us opportunity down the road to tell more stories.”

Peeples hopes the museum can inspire the next generation of health care professionals, scientists, and researchers. But the greatest takeaway? To remember the people of the past who shaped Pennsylvania Hospital into the center of excellence it is today.

“It’s been here for a very long time, and there are reasons for that. A lot of it has to do with the people,” she said. “This all started by wanting to help others. It all goes back to the idea of compassion.”