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MUMBAI: For a long time after it opened in 1892, Chinchpokli s BMC-run Covid-battling Kasturba Gandhi Hospital was a victim of social distancing. Not many Mumbaikars would dare to pass by this municipal facility that was varyingly called Small Pox Hospital, Plague Hospital, Arthur Road Hospital for Infectious Diseases or simply Contagious Hospital as per the reigning fever. British and Indian army men would guard the gates of its jungle-like grounds that housed large swaths of poor people battling relapsing fever and smallpox in tents. And two soldiers often flanked its only doctor, a Parsi gentleman called Dr NH Choksy, on his way to and from home. All this, because the civic hospital was seen as a place from which patients came out as corpses.