In 1830, a two-storey military epidemic hospital was constructed. For sanitary and epidemiological safety reasons, it was located at the Zatorski Highway (today Wojska Polskiego Street) at a considerable distance from other town buildings. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the hospital personnel very frequently were in the forefront of the battle against the rapidly spreading epidemics of cholera, typhus, dysentery and Spanish flu. During the First World War, the facility was overcrowded as there were as much as several thousand people staying on the premises. At that time wooden huts with ‘patient rooms’ were constructed at the back of the hospital. In the town itself, several major public buildings were seconded to serve as field hospitals. Among the patients at the epidemic hospital were also prisoners of war serving in the Tsar’s army, and later on Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Bolsheviks. In 1833 a hospital for civilians was launched opposite. It fulfilled this function until the mid-1890s when a new hospital building was commissioned in the neighbourhood of the Discalced Carmelites’ monastery.
It was in that hospital that the military doctor Samuel Taub, MD (1869-1933) had his medical practice. He was the father of Henryk Taub and the first Jewish physician in town. During the years of WWI, he served in the Stanisławów-based 20th National Defence Regiment, which was stationed in Wadowice as an auxiliary formation. After the war, he stayed in Wadowice together with his family. Taub was a benefactor of the Wadowice association Bikur Cholim, the members of which provided free medical care for impoverished Jews.