Almindelig Hospital - the General Hospital - in Amaliegade that opened in 1769 and was demolished in 1896

the apartment building on the site was designed by the architect Ole Boye
note: the arch is a side entrance into the royal palace

In April 1769 a hospital or almshouse for the elderly and the poor opened on Amaliegade.

It was a massive building that could provide a home for 700 paupers … possibly then a third of the poor in the city. Of those in the hospital, some 200 were too sick to work but many provided an income for the hospital by spinning wool and flax.

What seems so amazing is not so much the scale of the building or even that this is clear evidence of a coherent policy for social care in the city in the 18th century but this new building was at the centre of the main street in Frederiksstaden - the 18th-century extension of the city northwards - and was just metres from the grand houses of what was, just thirty years later, to become the royal palace of Amalienborg.

Nor was it the only hospital in this part of the city for the much grander Frederiks Hospital, completed in 1758, was on the opposite side of the street. That building is now the home of Designmuseum Danmark.

By the 19th century some 1,200 people were crammed into the buildings of the General Hospital and when the cholera epidemic struck the city in 1853, over 500 of the patients in the hospital died within the first month.

That catastrophic loss of life led to the construction of a large new general hospital, with small wards around courtyards, that was built outside the city defences, close to the lakes, and the hospital in Amaliegade was demolished in 1896.

A large apartment building designed by Ole Boye was built on the plot.