Dr Timothy Hynes sets new patient comfort standards with 1901-11 sanitorium in Flinders Street, Adelaide city
Dr Timothy Hynes, pictured about 1915 in his Henley Beach home garden, and (inset) the Italianate styling given to the former gothic Stow Congregational church manse, to create his American style health sanitorium in Flinders Street, Adelaide city, 1901-11.
Images courtes State Library of South Australian and City of Adelaide.
The sanitorium run by Dr Timothy Augustine Hynes in Flinders Street, Adelaide city, from 1901 to 1911, set new standards in patient comfort – or, as one writer put it, “it must have been a pretty good place in which to suffer!”.
Hynes believed that illness was best treated “when mental conditions are soothed and improved by cheerful surroundings'” and that “patients should have not the minimum but the maximum of comfort”. For a fixed fee of five guineas a week, Hynes provided for all medical and nursing treatment at the sanatorium as well as such comforts as the free use of “a roomy motor car and a box at the theatre”, orchestral concerts and a handball court.
Hynes' sanatorium was the first of its kind in Adelaide where a doctor was always in attendance. It was arranged, managed and equipped according to up-to-date ideas, including American-style sanitoriums, gained by Hynes' overseas travel and study.
A son of Patrick Hynes, a prominent local sheep farmer and mining promoter, Timothy Hynes was born at Blumberg (Birdwood) in the Adelaide Hills, in 1865. He attended Christian Brothers' College in Wakefield Street, Adelaide city, where his all-sports ability included being the colony’s champion high jumper. Hynes graduated in medicine and surgery at Edinburgh University and eventually returned as senior medical officer and surgeon at Adelaide Hospital. In 1889. Hynes bought and built up the practice of Dr O'Connell, one the city's leading physicians.
Hynes created his sanatorium, regarded as an innovation in hospitals, by buying the Stow Memorial Congregational Church manse in Flinders Street. The original gothic bluestone building from 1869 was transformed by being rendered and wrapped in a colonnaded facade to the south, west and rear extensions to give it an Italianate styling.
Under architect Edward John Woods, the former Protestant building became one of a series ofsimilar colonnaded works designed by Woods and Bagot, principally for the Catholic Church, and was one of the grandest of the secular buildings of this style.
The building was bought by the South Australian government in 1911 and accommodated a succession of state government departments before its 21st Century role as home to Jeffcott Chambers legal offices.
