Guy's Hospital

Guy's Hospital was founded in seventeen twenty-one by Thomas Guy, a successful businessman who built a massive fortune by printing Bibles and speculating in the South Sea Bubble. He originally established the institution as a dedicated space to treat chronically ill patients who had been discharged as incurables from the nearby Saint Thomas' Hospital. To secure the land, he negotiated a nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-year lease for the site at a mere peppercorn rent. Thomas Guy died just three years later, and his remains are interred within the hospital chapel inside a grand tomb featuring a sculpture by the artist John Bacon.