Similar RNH Bighi, Manoel Theatre, Fort Rinella, Megalithic Temples of Malta, National Museum of Archaeol | ||
The Royal Navy Hospital Mtarfa is a former British naval hospital in Mtarfa, Malta. It was the main hospital for British Forces in the eastern Mediterranean until the British left the now-independent Malta in 1979.
The hospital was commissioned in 1912 as a replacement for the then ageing Valletta Hospital. It was used during World War I under the name of St. George's Hospital to hold injured Australian and New Zealand troops from the failed 1915 landings at Gallipoli. British author and V.A.D. nurse Vera Brittain was stationed there in 1916 and 1917 and described her time there in her seminal work Testament of Youth. It may not have been much of a Hospital at that point, but demand was high and it was convenient for the Mtarfa naval cemetery. It was expanded enormously during the Second World War.
At one stage in the 1950s, it was renamed The David Bruce Royal Naval Hospital, after the wrongly believed discoverer of the root cause of Brucellosis (which was actually discovered by Sir Themistocles Zammit). It has now been converted to a state secondary school, named after Sir Temi Zammit, part of St Nicholas College.
The hospital is listed on the National Inventory of the Cultural Property of the Maltese Islands.