A series of full-scale shaking table tests were conducted at E-Defense for a four-story base-isolated hospital. The operation room in the specimen was chosen for detailed examination of its disorder and damage during large ground motions. It was arranged with various medical appliances in as a realistic manner as possible, and the appliances were characterized by casters installed at the bottom to ensure mobility. Two types of ground motion, the near-fault ground motion and long-period ground motion, were adopted, and the responses of the appliances were recorded using the motion capture technique. Thanks to the base isolation, the floor response was greatly reduced, and no disorder or damage was observed in the operation room except for the case when subjected to a long-period ground motion. In this case, the unlocked appliances moved seriously (by more than 3 m), and collisions occurred between the appliances and between appliances and the surrounding wall. The force of collision reached 36 kN, which is sufficient to injure a person. The acceleration due to collision was as high as 10 g, which is far beyond what can be tolerated by acceleration-sensitive appliances. It is notable that such large motion was not observed once the appliances were locked. The test was also carried out for the corresponding fixed-base structure. Among all cases in the experiment, by far the most serious damage occurred in the fixed-base structure when subjected to the near-fault ground motion, clearly because the floor response was significantly amplified from the ground motion. Copyright (C) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.