Savannah has experienced the good fortune of being a magnet for medical care almost since its founding in 1733. According to historians Preston Russell and Barbara Hines, the city’s “first civic hero” was a physician, Dr. Samuel Nunes Ribeiro, who was among a boatload of Portuguese Jews who came to the town about five months after Savannah was settled. Georgia’s founder, James Oglethorpe, credited Nunez, as he became known, with saving the colonists from the fevers that had killed several of them, including the only other doctor, William Cox.
The city was the site of Georgia’s first hospital, a facility incorporated in 1808, and since the mid-1950s Savannah has been served by three large hospitals, two of which merged into a single health-care system in the spring of 1997. The other hospital, Memorial Health University Medical Center, is the regional tertiary medical center, a circumstance that draws many medical specialists to the area.
The latest available statistics involving health care indicate that Chatham County is the home of 635 physicians, giving the area a ratio of 1 medical doctor for every 365 residents. Georgia’s first public health agencies were established in Savannah more than 100 years ago to combat yellow fever and improve the health of poor children. Since then, public health services have been expanded to offer preventive health services to all residents of the area and to provide primary care to those who do not have private physicians.