Mid XIX the capital was threatened by epidemics such as small pox, tuberculosis and cholera that every so often had outbreaks that caused devastation in the ciudad. Life expectancy was not greater than thirty years and, in the most critical moments of some of these epidemics, eight out of every ten children died.

It was 1872 and the country was facing a significant epidemic of small pox and tuberculosis and the then President, Federico Errázuriz Zañartu, saw the urgent need of building a hospital for common ill people, the El Salvador Hospital, and a Leper House for small pox and tuberculosis patients, the Hospital Saint Vincent de Paul. A commission is appointed for this purposes, lead by Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna and Ramón Barros Luco, to collect the necessary funds for building both hospitals; quickly, funds are collected and some small farms are bought in the Cañadilla, to raise the leper house of Saint Vincent de Paul.

The building of the Leper house is entrusted to the architect Eusebio Chelli, on May 9, 1872, who was in charge of drafting the drawings, but they were executed by the architect Karl Ernst Stegmöller, who developed all the construction details.

In parallel, in the lands of the old Barainca Farm, in the Providencia neighborhood, the building of the Hospital del Salvador begins with the drawings of the architect Ricardo Brown. The first stone is placed on January 1, 1872.

The construction of the Leper House and its chapel started on September 1, 1872 in the neighborhood of La Chimba. First the men’s section was erected and the chapel is projected as the central element and the building that orders all the hospital facility. The women’s section was built between 1888 and 1895, whose work was in charge of the architect Juan Geiger.

The Leper House was inaugurated in 1875 and the administration was left in charge of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, Congregation that arrived to Chile in 1860. Similarly, as all infectious and contagious disease centers that were attended by nuns, they risked their lives daily to take spiritual consolation to ill people and, also they kept a record of hospitalizations and the fate of each patient. The French religious nuns settled in cloisters, formed by pavilions attached to the south façade of the old cult building.

Afterwards in 1889, under the government of President José Manuel Balmaceda, between the men and women sections the building of the School of Medicine is built.

During the War of the Pacific, the facilities were exclusively allocated to the Army and the Leper House section for small pox patients. By 1891, close to 2000 wounded men from the battles of Concón and Placilla of the 1891 Revolution were given medical care.

In 1929, the Saint Vincent de Paul Hospital is officially given at the availability of the School of Medicine as its Clinical Hospital, which went through a ferocious fire in 1948, being totally destroyed along with the Medical School. The new hospital facility was built, whose works ended in 1952 and which was called the Jose Joaquin Aguirre Clinical Hospital in honor of Dr. Aguirre. That same year, construction works were started on the new and current School of Medicine, replacing the original one that was destroyed by fire, along with the demolition of the Saint Vincent de Paul Hospital, of which there were some disperse naves and the chapel, surrounded by the buildings of the hospital center.

The chapel, along with the School of Medicine and the hospital complex of Jose Joaquin Aguirre, belongs to the University of Chile; ecclesiastically, it belongs to the Archbishop of Santiago.

In the different periods there have been several restorations, the most important is focused on recovering the church respecting the original construction, giving value to the façade (constructions that were attached previously were eliminated and that did not allow reading the cross), walls were repaired substituting some of them with adobe and others with masonry, vaults, floors and roofs.