The clinical laboratory was developed under a medical commission composed of: Dr. Walter B. James, President of the New York Academy of Medicine; Dr. Charles W. Pilgrim, Chairman, New York State Hospital Commission; Dr. Thomas W. Salmon, Director of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene; Dr. G. H. Kirby, Director of the Psychiatric Institute of the State of New York; Dr. Isham G. Harris, Superintendent of the Brooklyn State Hospital; Dr. Carlos F. MacDonald, Alienist, and Dr. W. F. Brewer, Surgeon. Provision has been made on the first floor for a modern X-ray apparatus and its various accessories; three rooms for the physician in charge of the venereal examinations; a surgical laboratory; rooms fitted for the examinations of the eye, ear and throat, psychiatric and psychological examining room, dental operating room and laboratory, and a laboratory for the use of the staff working in the diagnosis and examination rooms.
On the second floor is a quantitative and qualitative laboratory; a museum, a recording room, a library and lecture rooms, and on the third floor are surgical wards, subdivided for major and minor operative cases, together with medical wards, so planned as to have ordinary and chronic medical cases in separate divisions. The hospital is to be freely used for detailed observation as well as for treatment.
The fourth floor contains a complete operating department with two operating rooms, one for major and the other for minor operations, each having separate sterilization facilities, together with preparation, etherizing and recovery rooms, while the remainder of the floor is given up to rooms for the male nurses and a convalescent solarium.
In addition to using the building as a clinical hospital for the housing of psychiatric and medical requirements of the prison, it is also planned to use it as a school for the education of male nurses, as it is found that efficiency in prison nursing is directly proportional to the nurse’s understanding of the relation of scientific, medical and psychiatric knowledge to the peculiar problems of a prison community.
The entire Sing Sing project includes kitchens, dining rooms, library, school, vocational shops, recreation hall, roads, walks, a modern sewage plant, a power house to heat and light the many buildings and to operate the industrial plants, and a church for the development of religious and community ideals.