Two members of Hawaiian royalty, watching their people die of foreign disease, built the hospital you see near here. King Kamehameha IV and his wife Queen Emma established The Queen's Hospital in 1859 after being deeply moved by the catastrophic decline of the Native Hawaiian population due to foreign diseases. When the first Westerners arrived in Hawaii in 1778, the population is estimated to have been somewhere between 300,000 and 800,000 people.
By 1859, it had fallen to fewer than 70,000. Measles, smallpox, whooping cough, influenza — diseases against which Native Hawaiians had no immunity — swept through communities with devastating efficiency. The King and Queen went door to door in Honolulu personally soliciting donations to build a hospital that could provide modern medical care to Native Hawaiian patients who could not afford private physicians.
Queen Emma raised money by selling her own jewelry. The hospital opened in 1860 with a European-trained physician and a mission to serve all people regardless of their ability to pay. Today, the Queen's Medical Center remains a Level I trauma center and the most important hospital in the Pacific islands.