Healthcare tradition going back over a century — today’s technology with a humane and caring approach
Samaritano was inaugurated on January 25th, 1894, the same day as the anniversary of the city of Sao Paulo, with the aim of caring for people of all creeds, races, and nationalities without distinction, an idea suggested by a Chinese Protestant called José Pereira Achao.
Mr. Achao emigrated to Brazil at the end of the 19th century and contracted typhoid fever. At a public hospital in São Paulo (Santa Casa de Misericórdia), he was told that non-Catholic patients had to be converted before being treated, whereas his ideal was a hospital that respected all creeds. On his passing in 1884, he bequeathed all his possessions to the Presbyterian Church so that this dream could come true.
The initiative was then taken by a group of British, American, and German immigrants, along with leading members of the community from the city’s “traditional families”, who founded Sociedade Hospital Evangélico in 1890, later reamed Hospital Samaritano.
Twentieth-century industrialization meant that São Paulo grew quickly. The hospital too expanded and modernized to provide better treatment conditions.
Hospital Samaritano kept up with advances in medicine by investing in equipment and technology to offer new clinical and surgical specialties, while ensuring that it developed its human resources too, physicians and health professionals, and administrative staff. From a small general hospital, it grew into a solidly based private institution that was not only self-supporting but also raising funds to run its philanthropic activities.
Samaritano is recognized as one of the best hospitals in the country, and everything in its long record of caring for people, now going back for over a century, shows the importance of the human side of medicine.
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