Once upon a time, in Canada, people thought we didn't need hospitals. It's hard to believe, but they thought that hospitals were for poor people who couldn't afford to pay a doctor to come to their house. Or for those people who didn't have a house for the doctor to come to. People confused hospitals with the poor house, or insane asylums, or with temporary quarantine stations when there was an outbreak of an infectious disease. It was hard to argue for building a special, permanent, expensive structure just for health care.