An immense amount of history has been hidden in Husi's hospitals, but until now it has been hidden from the eyes of ordinary people. Now Hus is putting together an exhibition at the Helsinki Art Gallery for the end of autumn.
In the middle Meilahti's deceptively large hospital area is a hidden place from another time. New hospitals are rising all around, but their patients don't notice this.
If you can find it, you're already in the inner circle. Husi's CEO and the rest of the administration stay here.
The building, together with the house next to it, is the oldest in the area, it started with funding from the tsar and was completed at the beginning of the 20th century. In that sense, it represents the whole of Hus, that the hospitals have as much history as several museums hidden anyway, and the patients have not seen it to this extent. Before this.
The name of the building is a bit bureaucratic and boring, Palvelukeskus.
The third in the corridor on the first floor of the Service Center, there is another hidden treasure. There is a sign in the doorway: Mannerheim hall. It has been hung on it by a person who recently retired from the position of Husi's medical manager Eero Hirvensalo.
“I took it with me from the Töölö hospital and put it in there. Otherwise, it would have stayed there,” says Hirvensalo.
Two “flower columns” were saved from the Töölö hospital left by Hus, which are thought to have been brought by Mannerheim from his travels.
X-ray therapy folders placed on the cover of the Mannerheim hall grand piano. In the early days of X-rays, it was thought that the rays could cure many ailments.
In 1956, the soldier received a doctor's certificate stating that he was not fit for work.
The hall has historical furniture and visual art, especially from the recently emptied Töölö, whose low red brick part has already been largely demolished.
These valuables were saved by the staff when it was decided to close down the Töölö hospital. And the name of the hall here in Meilahti is not officially the Mannerheim hall, but it is now used.
Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim is related to Töölö in that he was founding the then Finnish Red Cross Hospital, completed in 1932. At that time, as chairman of SPR, he gave his prestige and face to the construction project. He even chose some of the furniture himself.
The one assembled in the hall is just an example. Töölö Hospital's museum collection alone consists of approximately 1,000 objects and 1,700 pho
tographs. Hundreds of them can be browsed on the finna.fi service, but otherwise ordinary people have not seen them.
But let's go back to the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when Helsinki's hospital life was a time of growth along with the city's population. The university had been moved from Turku to Helsinki in 1828. University hospitals and the highest education in the field moved with it.
The Meilahti hospital area in 1949. On the right, the current property maintenance building and the Service Center, on the left, the later completed, current ear and eye clinic.
The construction of the service center (left) and heat center (right) started in Meilahti exactly 110 years ago in 1914. In the background is the 15-story Tower Hospital, nicknamed the Hilton, opened in 1965 and designed by architects Jaakko Paatela and Reino Koivula.
In the year In 1903, the medical board at the time proposed that a large area of Helsinki be requested from the emperor, where all university hospitals would be located. Historian, current director of the Espoo City Museum Maarit Henttonen writes about it in the 2002 yearbook of the Finnish Medical Society:
“The location of the hospital area was decided when the city offered a rocky forest area on the southern edge of Meilahti's former rail farm, the southern part of the current Meilahti hospital area. The state accepted the offer in 1907, and the area was redeemed by Nicholas II's decision in 1909.”
The intention was that maintenance buildings and a dermatology and venereal disease clinic would first be built on the two plots. Good intentions were interrupted by the First World War. Fortunately, the emperor had already donated money.
“Construction began at the beginning of 1914 with money granted by Emperor Nicholas II the previous year in honor of the 300th anniversary of the Romanov family.”
Only the heating center and the financial building, i.e. the current Service Center, had time to be built. They were completed by Finland's first medical architect of Magnus Schjerfbeck according to the drawings to the puddled rocks of Meilahti in 1918.
Recycling started in Meilahti almost a hundred years ago. When the planned hospital for skin and venereal diseases was not built, the stone foundation that had time for its completion was not left lying on the rocks: “Keisar's stones”, the reddish granite of Virolahti was used for the foundation stone of the Women's Clinic that opened in 1936, Henttonen writes.
The hospital center in Meilahti, which has now grown enormously, was later possible to realize in accordance with the ancient town planning, even though many hospitals have been built since then in different decades. In the neighborhood are, for example, the New Children's Hospital, which was completed in 2018, and the Siltasairaala, which opened last year.
In addition to Schjerfbeck, well-known architects have made their suggestions for the site plan Eliel Saarinen and Lars Sonck. Already then, Saarinen reserved Meilahti almost entirely for public buildings, when he made his larger Munkkiniemi-Haaga and Suur-Helsinki plans.
Nurses dining at the Finnish Red Cross Hospital in Töölö in 1939. The chairs in the space called the Parquet Hall and Parquet Hall were conserved in the early 2000s, and some of them have now been moved to the Mannerheim Hall of the Meilahti Service Center.
The name board that was in use next to the outside door of the B-staircase of Töölö hospital. Among other things, nurses lived in Crabu, and it was noted on the board whether one was at home, outside or at work.
A wooden sugar box was used in department 1 of the Finnish Red Cross Hospital. During the rationing, the sugar was stored in a locked box and the ward nurse gave the sugar to the patients from there. Sugar and syrup were ordered to be rationed under the threat of the Winter War in October 1939. Sugar was freed from rationing in February 1954, and coffee a month later.
To the place In addition to Hirvensalo, the chairman emerita of the Finnish Medical Association has come to the Mannerheim hall Kati Myllymäkichairman of the museum committee, psychiatrist Ilkka Taipale and project planners Maria Tukia and Anders Manns.
The latter two are Hus museum employees. They have organized and cataloged the hospital association's collections.
The collection is huge. This is evidenced, for example, by the 385-page brick published in 2020 Health in store – One hundred collections and museums from Uusimaa. So a hundred! Tukia and Manns have been involved in editing the book.
Both the art committee and the museum committee work in Hus. The museum committee established in 2018 is actively mapping Husi's collections, which according to the current estimate have more than 12,000 objects and more than 15,000 photographs.
The treasure of the Mannerheim Hall is currently relatively small compared to this. Let me mention the sculptor placed on the wall Wäinö Aaltonen (1894–1966) sculpted relief. The opposite wall looks into the hall Simo Brofeldt (1892–1942), Mannerheim's (1867–1951) surgeon.
Most museum work is done in the field. Chairman of the museum committee, Ilkka Taipale, says that the collection is to be founded this spring.
In November 2024, Hus will organize an exhibition of his collections at Helsinki Art Gallery.
Simo Brofeldt looks at the Mannerheim Hall in the Service Center.
Wäinö Aaltonen's relief from 1934 has also found its way into the Mannerheim hall.
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