Victoria Memorial Hospital (Bahrain)
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In November 1901, once the official period of mourning for Queen Victoria had passed, Gangaram Tikamdas and some other leading British Indian merchants of Bahrain offered 5000 rupees for the erection of a hospital to ‘perpetuate the memory of her late Majesty’.[5] Gangaram Tikamdas was the first Thattai Bhatia to come to Bahrain in the early 1900s.[6]
These traders expressed their willingness to donate in appreciation of "the blessings of free trade and peace they had enjoyed under British protection during the reign of the Queen".[5]
The then Government of India, which was British, acknowledged the merchants’ ‘loyalty and public spirit’ but were reluctant to support such a financially costly scheme unless some ‘political advantage’ would arise from it. The Political Agent at Bahrain, John Calcott Gaskin,[7] managed to persuade his superiors that the hospital's construction would be highly appreciated by the ‘natives’.[5] Also, it was assumed that this will divert the sick from American missionary doctors operating in the Persian Gulf, and particularly in Bahrain at the Mason Memorial Hospital, thus bringing the inhabitants of Bahrain, and also the mainland of Eastern Arabia, under British influence. ‘For this reason principally’, he wrote, ‘the matter should be given favourable consideration by Government’.[5]
Most of the construction costs were met by subscriptions from among the Hindu community of Bahrain, as well as leading Arab and Persian merchants. Popular contributors were Haji Muqbil al-Dhukayr and Abd al-Nabi Kazruni.,[1] but the Government of India undertook to finance the future maintenance of the hospital.
Opening
In 1905, the Victoria Memorial Hospital, as it was named, opened its doors to public.[4]
According to the book Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800 by Nelida Fuccaro, the hospital had been quickly constructed in 1904.
"The first modern medical facilities were established at the beginning of the twentieth century by the American missionaries and then by the British agency which had subsidized the construction of the Victoria Memorial Hospital in 1904. The government-built al-Na’im and al-Salmaniyya hospitals were added, in the outskirts of the town, in 1937 and 1959 respectively"[1].