It was the city's first permanent fever hospital and was built by Dundee Town Council to treat patients with infectious diseases, including typhus, diphtheria and smallpox.

Until the late 1860s, such patients had usually been admitted to Dundee Royal Infirmary, although a temporary fever hospital had been set up in a converted building in Lower Union Street during the 1832 cholera outbreak.

These included King's Cross Hospital (West), built in 1893 as accommodation for cases of smallpox, with a small unit for cholera patients.

The hospital is also the site of NHS Tayside's Kings Cross Health and Community Care Centre, which offers several outpatient services including audiology, physiotherapy, dentistry and x-ray and is also the base for Dundee's "Out of Hours GP Service".

[1] The same institution also holds the papers of Dr William Maxwell Jamieson OBE who worked at the hospital from 1939 until 1979 and became its Physician Superintendent in 1948.