ABSTRACT
In October 1926, at the Annual Dinner of the Straits Settlements Association, Sir Laurence Guillemard, British Governor of the Straits Settlements at that time, boasted that his speedy recovery from ill-health was a “testimony to Malaya as a health resort.”1 Central to Guillemard’s boast and his resurrection of the old myth of Malaya as a health resort was the completion of the new Singapore General Hospital (SGH) complex. Guillemard proclaimed:
With the completion of our new General Hospital and the Mental Disease
Hospital at Trafalgar, and the improvement of other curative institutions,
Singapore will in this respect be one of the best-equipped centres in the Far East.
