Hi Cando,
The Coast Hospital was Sydney's infectious diseases hospital. There would have been a lot of TB patients out there. There were a huge number of infectious diseases treated there, cholera, typhoid, Scarlet fever, measles, mumps, flu amongst them. My Mum's sister had Dyphtheria in the 1920s and was treated there. It used to be at the end of the world in those days, a long way from the city. When I worked there, there was only one bus per hour from Railway Square ( in the city), and another bus once an hour from Circular Quay. It wasn't a good place to get to even then. By the 70s, the hospital was a major teaching institution, and had one of the two spinal injury wards in Sydney, and was a major neurosurgical and cardiac surgical unit. There was still a three-storey ward block, known as the Marks' pavilion, that was for infectious patients. The ground floor was kids, and the upper two floors were adults.
The Institute of Tropical Medicine was the euphemistically-named unit which treated leprosy patients, and we did get a few patients each year for xrays. Treatment for Leprosy is now so much better, there isn't the need for isolation.
All the staff at Prince Henry were appalled when the State Government chose to sell it off to the highest bidder (a developer, of course). There is a lovely Golf course, and the views over the ocean are spectacular. Which means, of course, that the land was worth a fortune, and it's easy to say that greed won over. Of course, the aforementioned transport problems didn't help. There were a lot of elderly folk who had no other option than to use buses to visit family members out there. Still, a shame the old girl is gone.
Cheers, Jude
