Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital is one of the oldest maternity hospitals in Europe, founded in 1739 in London. Until October 2000, it occupied a site at 339–351 Goldhawk Road, Hammersmith, but is now located between East Acton and White City, adjacent to the Hammersmith Hospital. It is managed by the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. History The hospital strictly dates its foundation to 1739 when Sir Richard Manningham established a maternity hospital of lying-in beds in a 17-room house on Jermyn Street. This hospital was called the General Lying-in Hospital, and it was the first of its kind in Britain. In 1752 the hospital relocated from Jermyn Street to Marylebone Road and became one of the first teaching institutions. The hospital appears to have arisen out of the 1739 foundation, but with varying degrees of recognition, developing over time. On 10 January 1782 a licence was granted to the hospital charity by the Justices of the County of Middlesex (at that time a legal requirement for all maternity hospitals). In 1809 the Duke of Sussex persuaded his mother, Queen Charlotte, to become patron of the hospital: it became, at that time, the Queen's Lying-in Hospital. The queen held an annual ball to raise funds for the hospital. The medical centre moved to the Old Manor House at Lisson Green in Marylebone in 1813 where it was completely rebuilt to a design by Charles Hawkins in 1856. Queen Victoria granted a Royal Charter to the hospital in 1885. It was renamed Queen Charlotte's Maternity Hospital and Midwifery Training School in 1923. Maternal death was a common occurrence in London throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, especially among healthy young women who were in good health prior to their pregnancies. For more than a century, the maternal death rate was used to measure the effectiveness of maternity services and treatment. One specific cause of maternal death, postpartum infection (then known as childbed fever, and now also as puerperal sepsis), was referred to as the doctor's plague, because it was more common in hospitals than in home births. Once the method of transmission was understood in 1931, an isolation block was created in Goldhawk Road. The rest of the maternity hospital moved to Goldhawk Road to co-locate with the isolation block in 1940. In 1948, following the creation of the National Health Service, the hospital linked up with the Chelsea Hospital for