Pratt Clinic/New England Center Hospital Records

The Pratt Clinic/New England Center Hospital (PC/NECH) was established in 1931. Joseph Pratt, the Boston Dispensary's (BD) Physician-in-Chief, worked with his Board of Managers to create a twenty-bed diagnostic ward within the BD, financed by William Bingham II, a patient of Pratt’s. Along with his assistant, Dr. Samuel Proger, Dr. Pratt developed a three-pronged approach – teaching, research, and patient care – to medical practice. This model, developed over time at the PC/NECH, would fuel the unified medical unit that come to be known as the Tufts-New England Medical Center (T-NEMC) in 1965. Until then, the New England Medical Center (NEMC) was an overseer of the independent medical institutions the BD, Boston Floating Hospital (BFH), and the PC/NECH, with each institution maintaining its own management structure. NEMC, which already had an affiliation with Tufts University, thus became the primary teaching hospitals for the Tufts University School of Medicine. Samuel Proger, who not only served as the PC/NECH’s medical director and president of its board, was also a professor and Chair of Tufts’ Department of Medicine.

Though the diagnostic ward within the BD was opened in 1931, the PC/NECH’s fusion with NEMC began a year later. Bingham, along with Doctors Farnsworth, Pratt, and Proger, organized the Bingham Associates Fund in Maine. With a mission for promoting medicine and medical education in the state of Maine, the BAF used the resources of the newly formed New England Medical Center consortium. Doctors Pratt and Proger believed research was an essential component to the clinical care of patients.

During the 1930s Pratt and Proger recruited German immigrants such as Alice Ettinger, Siefried Thannhauser, and Alfred Hauptmann to work with them. The ward was a great success, and with the need for more beds, the Joseph Pratt Diagnostic Hospital, commonly known as the Pratt Clinic (PC), was built on Bennett Street and opened on December 15, 1938. It was the largest diagnostic facility in the United States at the time. The Pratt Clinic was at the heart of BAF’s mission to improve medical care, first in Maine, and then in New England. The Pratt Clinic served as the BAF's base of operations; it was a hospital affiliated with a medical school, that school being the Tufts College School of Medicine.

Proger, not only a doctor but also an expert administrator, cultivated a group of wealthy donors to finance the Pratt Clinic, in particular for a series of physical expansions starting in the 1940s. The Pratt Clinic was lacking a facility for surgery, so patients had to be transferred to other hospitals in Boston. With an aim to provide total medical care at one location, a department of surgery was established in 1946. At the same time, the Pratt Clinic separated from the BD and incorporated as part of the Bingham Associates of Massachusetts, and organization that supplanted the BAF. Richard Viguers served as its first and only administrator.

The first of several institutional name changes for the PC/NECH occurred in 1948, when the Bingham Associates of Massachusetts renamed itself the New England Center Hospital. The George B. Farnsworth Surgical Building was opened in 1949, and the Ziskind Building for research (honoring Jacob Ziskind, a patient of Proger’s and donor to the PC) opened in 1952. With the death of Dr. Pratt in 1958, the institution was renamed the Pratt Clinic/New England Center Hospital. Another financial gift from one of Dr. Proger’s patients made possible for the purchase of the Biewend Building for ambulatory care.

The biggest change in the history of the New England Medical Center occurred on March 1, 1965, when the Board of Trustees for each institution (BD, BFH, and PC/NECH) voted yes to an official merger to integrate. The consolidation of these three institutions formed one corporation under the name the New England Medical Center Hospitals, Inc. In addition, during the merger, the Tufts-New England Medical Center (T-NEMC) had also been established as a separate corporation. T-NEMC had its own board, composed of members of the Board of Trustees of Tufts, as well as members of the Board of Governors of NEMC. This relationship would continue to grow, with professors at the School of Medicine making a concerted push to have the T-NEMC serve as the primary teaching hospitals for the School of Medicine.

The PC/NECH morphed the clinical unit of T-NEMC. T-NEMC underwent its final name change in 2008. It is now know as the Tufts Medical Center, and is located in the Chinatown neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.