Qualla: Naval Medical Center Portsmouth

Naval Medical Center Portsmouth: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. Workers building the new naval hospital in 1827 carried more than five hundred thousand bricks across the lawn. They came from Fort Nelson, the Revolutionary War earthwork that had defended this bend of the Elizabeth River from the British and had since fallen into disrepair. The architect, John Haviland, set those bricks into the foundation and interior walls of his three-story granite building. The men working the cholera wards in 1832, and the influenza wards in 1918, and the burn wards after Pearl Harbor, walked on floors held up by the rubble of an older war. Naval Medical Center Portsmouth is the oldest continuously running hospital in the Navy. It has been on the same point of land, doing the same work, for almost two centuries.

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Naval Medical Center Portsmouth: The Building

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Haviland was one of the most accomplished architects of early-republic America - he designed prisons, churches, and asylums up and down the East Coast - and he gave the Navy a building of unusual gravity. A hollow rectangle, 172 feet wide by 192 feet deep, set on a twelve-foot gr...

Image: Public domain

Naval Medical Center Portsmouth: Who Did the Work

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Muster roll Gosport Naval Yard and Hospital 1Oct 1832 to 31 Oct 1832, p.146, line 75 Madeline Flanders nurse, and other civilian employees Miscellaneous Records of the Secretary of the Navy, roll 183, NARA RG 45., Public domain. The early hospital ran on enslaved labor. The 1815 payroll and the 1832 hospital muster name African Americans working as nurses, attendants, cooks, washers, boatmen, and gravediggers, and on January 2, 1832 Commodore Lewis Warrington confirmed the practice in a letter to the Sec...

Image: Muster roll Gosport Naval Yard and Hospital 1Oct 1832 to 31 Oct 1832, p.146, line 75 Madeline Flanders nurse, and other civilian employees Miscellaneous Records of the Secretary of the Navy, roll 183, NARA RG 45. | Public domain

Naval Medical Center Portsmouth: The Yellow Fever Summer

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain. In June 1855, the steamer USS Franklin docked at Norfolk after sailing from the West Indies. Mosquitoes carrying yellow fever escaped the ship. By August, twenty to seventy citizens a day were falling ill. Portsmouth begged the Navy for help. The hospital threw open its doors to ...

Image: National Archives and Records Administration | Public domain

Naval Medical Center Portsmouth: The Influenza Ward

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Navy Medicine from Washington, DC, USA, Public domain. On September 13, 1918, the great influenza pandemic arrived at the Naval Training Station at Hampton Roads. Recruits filled the hospital. Three thousand five came down with the disease at the training station alone; one hundred seventy-five of them died. Many were treated at Port...

Image: Navy Medicine from Washington, DC, USA | Public domain

Naval Medical Center Portsmouth: The Skyscraper and What Came After

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Navy Medicine from Washington, DC, USA, Public domain. World War II expanded the hospital fast. A $1.5 million emergency program in 1941 pushed bed capacity to 3,441; on a single August day in 1944, the staff cared for 2,997 patients at once. After the war the campus kept growing. Building 215, finished to centralize the scattered me...

Image: Navy Medicine from Washington, DC, USA | Public domain