This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital was founded in 1882 on Bethlehem Road, south of Jerusalem's old city, by the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, the same royal order of chivalry that founded St John Ambulance in England five years earlier. Sir Edmund Lechmere, a baronet who had witnessed the region's acute lack of eye care firsthand, was instrumental in establishing it, and Queen Victoria granted the new hospital a royal charter. War interrupted its work directly: during the First World War the Turkish Army seized the building for ammunition storage, and it sustained damage in the Battle of Jerusalem in 1917. Following the British Mandate, the hospital was rebuilt and expanded through the 1920s, and after the 1948 to 1949 armistice left its original site in no-man's land, it operated for a decade from temporary quarters before opening its present building in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, in 1960.
The hospital's reach has widened well beyond that single site since. A mobile outreach programme began in 1980, a clinic opened in Gaza City in 1992 and grew into a full hospital there in 2016, and further satellite centres opened in Hebron in 2005 and Anabta, in the northern West Bank, in 2007, the network treating well over 135,000 patients a year regardless of race, religion or ability to pay.