Description
The Royal Navy Hospital Mtarfa was a British naval hospital in Mtarfa, Malta. It was the main hospital for British Forces in the eastern Mediterranean until the British left the now-independent Malta in 1979.
The hospital was commissioned in 1912 as a replacement for the then ageing Valletta Hospital. It was used during World War I to hold injured Australian and New Zealand troops from the failed 1915 landings at Gallipoli. It may not have been much of a Hospital at that point, but demand was high and it was convenient for the Mtarfa naval cemetery. It was expanded enormously during the Second World War.
At one stage in the 1950s, it was renamed the David Bruce Royal Naval Hospital, after the doctor who discovered the root cause of Malta Fever or Brucellosis. It has now been converted to a state secondary school, named after Sir Temi Zammit, part of St Nicholas College.
