Rockefeller War Demonstration Hospital

The Rockefeller War Demonstration Hospital stood as a cluster of temporary frame buildings on the lawn of the Rockefeller Institute in 1917. It functioned as an experimental field hospital to teach military surgeons a life-saving technique for treating infected wounds called the Carrel-Dakin method. This method involved using a specialized system of tubes to irrigate wounds with a chlorine-based solution, a breakthrough that drastically reduced infection rates on the battlefields of the First World War. The hospital was designed with a unique safety feature to account for the realities of aerial warfare. Every few yards, sections of the walls were built to swing outward on pulley systems, creating what architects called bomb exits. These allowed nurses and patients to evacuate the wooden structures rapidly if a building caught fire or sustained damage. By August of 1918, the facility transitioned into United States Army Auxiliary Hospital Number One. During its time in operation, it trained nearly one thousand officers and enlisted men from the Army and Navy in advanced battlefield medical procedures. Beyond its clinical training mission, the hospital served as a prototype for standardizing the construction of portable field hospitals, providing a template that could be deployed quickly in various theaters of war.