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This thesis is an examination of the social transformation of the hospital in late nineteenth-century Hamilton. It traces the hospital's evolution from its roots as a charitable institution to a medical facility that became slowly transformed into a temple of healing. Nineteenth-century medical institutions were essentially primitive places that offered routine care to the sick poor. A mixture of rudimentary therapies and an indigent clientele strengthened the perception that hospital health-care was for the truly desperate. This situation persisted until the hospital became transformed by a powerful combination of scientific and societal forces during the latter part of the century. The advent of anaesthesia, Listerism and diagnostic technology made intensive surgical procedures a reality and helped to make hospitalization increasingly attractive to the affluent, who traditionally viewed medicine as a commodity for home consumption. The transition to a showplace for modern medicine was exceedingly costly. Hospitals, forced to finance new capital costs from existing budgets, quickly plunged into deficit situations and were forced to find new sources of revenue. In order to balance the financial ledger, local clinics turned toward patients who were willing to pay for hospital care. This desire to treat paying patients, however, obscured the hospital's original charitable mission. Local medical institutions abandoned the benevolent ideal of treating the indigent in order to service the medical requirements of the affluent, whose payment for medical care offset the high costs of operating a scientific clinic. As the hospital began to offer different levels of care depending on one's ability to pay for services, it reflected the values and social relationships that characterized this industrial community.