HEALTH MATTERS
Dr Holliday
Number C.2
Given the situation we find ourselves in, a few people have asked me recently about the old Fever Hospital near the shore in Heanish. This was built by the Mull District Committee of Argyll County Council in 1905 so that islanders with diseases such as scarlet fever or smallpox could be removed from their crowded houses and looked after professionally. It was erected by the same company that put up the Reading Room in Scarinish, Spiers and Company from Glasgow. A two-bedded ward lay at each end of the building with a kitchen, nurse’s room and bathroom in the centre. Sixty cubic metres of space were allowed per patient. Nurses were brought over from the mainland on demand.
The first case was a mother and two children with diphtheria, and an epidemic was averted due to the quick action of Dr Roger MacNeill, the County Medical Officer. Thereafter it was rarely used. It was let out as a house in the 1920s, although the first tenants were told that they would have to move out in a hurry if there was another epidemic!
Dr John Holliday
