Bill seeks to restore Cebu hospital's name

MANILA, Philippines — A lawmaker has filed a bill in the House of Representatives seeking to rename the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center in Cebu to the Southern Islands Medical Center. But Rep. Nerissa Corazon Ruiz, who authored House Bill 4417, said the bill did not stem from the rectal surgery scandal that broke out last April. The hospital hit the headlines recently when a video showing doctors removing a body spray canister from a 39-year-old patient’s rectum showed up on the video-sharing site YouTube. Ruiz said the passage of her proposal is meant to give back the hospital its former name, which she said has touched the lives of its patients, personnel and their families. "The name Southern Islands has played and is still playing a significant and unique role in the countless lives that it has touched not only from the Visayas region but also from Mindanao and honoring a distinguished leader is not reason enough to defeat this especially that there exists no significant relation between the facility and the person in whose honor and memory it is so named," she said in a statement on the House of Representatives website (www.congress.gov.ph). "With due respect to the late senator in whose memory and honor the hospital's present name was dedicated, the change of name — from Southern Islands Hospital to Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center — was unnecessary and improper not only for the fact that no public hearing was conducted for this purpose, but primarily for the reason that the hospital has generated goodwill in its long years of operation and has been enshrined in the American Cultural Heritage Archive in Washington D.C. by the name Southern Islands Hospital," she added. She said it will also preserve a significant cultural heritage that the name Southern Islands Hospital has generated for Filipinos. Besides, she said the hospital's former name, Southern Islands Medical Center, is still widely recognized until the present. Ruiz, who chairs the House committee on millennium development goals, said the present-day Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center was established in Cebu City on April 1, 1913, as a 30-bed medical facility to cater to the health needs of the people from the Visayas area. It was named Hospital del Sur and was later renamed Southern Islands Hospital on Jan. 12, 1918, by which name it operated and became widely known for almost 75 years, Soon-Ruiz said. Through Republic Act 7582, which took effect on June 21, 1992, the hospital's name was again changed into its present name Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center in honor of Vicente Yap Sotto, a former senator regarded by his as a "recalcitrant" and “principled" man. Sotto, whose grandson Vicente “Tito" Sotto II would follow in his footsteps and became a senator in 1992, was also regarded as the Father of Cebuano Language and Letters. According to Wikipedia, Sotto at the young age of 22 in 1899 put up La Justicia, the first newspaper in Cebu published by a Philippine citizen, in which he defended the issue of Philippine independence. It was suspended on orders by the American military governor. But an unfazed Sotto opened El Nacional, which was not only ordered closed but also caused his imprisonment. After some years of exile in Hong Kong, he returned home to continue with his fight for press freedom and independence. He would later author the Press Freedom Law (now known as the Sotto Law, Republic Act No. 53) of 1946, which protects journalists from being compelled to name their news sources, son after he was elected senator. - GMANews.TV