The Resident Physician’s House

History is all around us in Boston, and sometimes Marty and I discover it simply by walking without a particular destination. Near Massachusetts General Hospital, we came across this modest red-brick house. Surrounded today by the enormous modern buildings of MGH, it would be easy to walk past without realizing that it represents an important chapter in the development of one of America’s oldest hospitals.

In the early years of Massachusetts General Hospital, the administrative head of the hospital was a superintendent rather than a physician. As the hospital grew, its leadership structure changed and the position of Resident Physician was created, giving a doctor responsibility for the day-to-day medical oversight of patients and hospital operations. The first resident physicians lived within the hospital itself, in rooms in the original Bulfinch Building.

By the late nineteenth century, that arrangement had changed. In 1891, architect Carl Fehmer designed this house for MGH Resident Physician Dr. John Pratt and his growing family. The location made sense. A resident physician was exactly that: he lived at the hospital. At a time long before telephones, automobiles, emergency departments and the sophisticated communications systems of a modern medical center, having a physician living immediately beside the hospital meant that medical assistance was always close at hand.

The house originally stood at the corner of Blossom and Allen Streets, close to the Bulfinch Building, which was the center of the nineteenth-century hospital campus. Perhaps the most unusual part of the house’s story is that the building itself has moved, twice. As Massachusetts General Hospital expanded, the little physician’s house repeatedly found itself standing in the way of progress. Rather than demolish it, MGH preserved it. In 1949 it was moved from its original location to Blossom Street. Then, as another period of hospital expansion approached, the house was moved again in 1983 to its present location on North Grove Street.

Moving an entire nineteenth-century brick house is no small undertaking. Its survival says something about the recognition that even within a constantly changing medical campus, there was value in preserving a physical connection to the hospital’s earlier history.

Today, the Resident Physician’s House stands almost dwarfed by the modern MGH buildings surrounding it. The contrast is striking. Medicine has changed enormously since Dr. Pratt and his family lived here in the 1890s, and Massachusetts General Hospital has grown from a relatively small collection of buildings into one of the world’s major medical centers.

That is what made finding it while walking through Boston so interesting to me. We weren’t looking for it. We simply stopped to read a sign and discovered that the house had not only witnessed more than a century of change at Massachusetts General Hospital. It had been picked up and moved twice so that it could continue to be part of that history.

For me, it is another example of why walking through Boston with no particular destination can be so rewarding. Among the glass towers, parking garages and modern hospital buildings, a small house from 1891 is still there, quietly preserving a very different era in the history of medicine.