5. Rommelaere
For a long time the city hospital was located in the neo-Gothic building with the glass entrance. Initially, it is here that the students of the Faculty of Medicine practise their medical skills. Interaction between city and university has nowhere been as intense as here.
The confrontation with the misery of the workers from Ghent must have been quite a shock to many students. For the professors, the patients were a constant motivation in their quest for improved diagnoses, better remedies and more accurate treatments But nowhere interaction has been more problematic either. The ongoing difficulty lies in sharing and distributing tools, patients and corpses. These are needed for educational purposes, but the city doctors do not like to share them. The two parties also often question each other's diagnoses. Not very conducive to the health of patients...
Things improve considerably when the university opens its own outpatient clinics in 1905, next to the hospital and connected to it by a long corridor. The Rommelaere complex is located across the street. The complex houses the Institute for Hygiene, Bacteriology and Forensic Medicine (called the Rommelaere Institute), the Institute for Pharmacodynamics and the Institute for Fysiology. The building is notable for the coloured stone facade and frivolous turrets, the trademark of City Architect, Louis Cloquet.
In the Institute for Pharmacodynamics, Nobelprize winner in Medicine (1938), professor Corneel Heymans did his research.