Originally devised in the early 20th century as a specialised hospital for infectious diseases, Curry Cabral Hospital currently offers many other specialities: it is perhaps best known as the national reference centre on liver transplantation and hepato-bilio-pancreatic diseases, and as the only public physical medicine and rehabilitation inpatient care service in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area.

[1] It is named after José Curry da Câmara Cabral (1844–1920), eminent clinician and medical researcher who was instrumental in the creation of the hospital in 1906.

The place chosen for it was a vacant plot of land that had originally belonged to an old Franciscan nunnery, the Convent of Our Lady of Sorrows (Convento de Nossa Senhora das Dores), in the neighbourhood of Rego, in the Avenidas Novas area of Lisbon that was developing at the time as the city expanded north.

The creation of this new hospital was only possible through the personal involvement of Prime Minister Hintze Ribeiro[2] and a substantial grant from Caixa Geral de Depósitos, the largest Portuguese public banking corporation.

In the late 1990s, the hospital's infrastructure, virtually unchanged since its inception nearly a century prior, was showing signs of obvious deterioration and underwent much-needed modernisation.