History
In 1875 Elizabeth McMaster and several other women from Toronto set up a children's hospital. Starting in April the hospital admitted forty-four patients and treated sixty-seven as outpatients.
In 1876 the hospital moved to larger facilities. In 1891 the hospital moved from rented premises to a building constructed for it at College and Elizabeth streets where it would remain for sixty years. This old building, known as the Victoria Hospital for Sick Children, is now the Toronto area headquarters of Canadian Blood Services. In 1951 the hospital moved to its present University Avenue location, on the grounds where Canadian star Mary Pickford's childhood home once stood. The hospital underwent its last major expansion in 1993 with the construction of a glass-roofed atrium on the east side of the main building.
- 1883: The hospital opens the first fresh air sanitarium in Toronto, and likely Canada, for the treatment of tuberculosis and other ailments.
- 1892: A school is opened. This is the first time a school has been set up within a hospital.
- 1908: SickKids installed the first milk pasteurization plant in Canada and leads the fight for compulsory pasteurization.
- 1918: First research laboratory at SickKids is established. In the 1930s, the laboratory enriches milk with Vitamin D to combat rickets that plagues many of the patients admitted to the hospital.
- 1919: SickKids pioneered blood transfusion for children.
- 1930: Frederick Tisdall, Theodore Drake and Alan Brown invented the pre-cooked cereal, Pablum, which provided infants with nutrition and generated funds for establishment of SickKids Research Institute in 1954.
- 1963: Dr. William Thornton Mustard develops the Mustard procedure used to help correct heart problems in blue babies.
- 1973: SickKids Foundation was established to raise funds for SickKids.
- 1979: Dr. Robert B. Salter invented continuous passive motion used for reconstructive joint surgery.
- 1989: The gene responsible for cystic fibrosis, cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator, was discovered by Dr. Tsui Lap-chee and other SickKids scientists. Although a cure for CF has not been found, the life span of CF patients has since improved considerably.
- 1997: The Congenital Heart Surgeons' Society Data Center, a US-based organization, was established at SickKids. Almost 6000 patients with congenital heart disease have been enrolled in various research studies leading to many improvements in care of such patients worldwide.
- 1998: The Centre for Applied Genomics was established with Tsui Lap-chee as as director and Stephen W. Scherer as associate director.
- 2007: Mondial Energy Inc. (now known as GEMCO Solar) installs the first hospital-based solar thermal energy system on the rooftop of SickKids Hospital. The system is used to heat up the hospital’s hot water supply for domestic use, saving the hospital in energy costs.
- 2009: SickKids researchers identified eight genes, which, when mutated, cause medulloblastoma, the most common childhood brain cancer. In 2010, the disease was identified as four distinctly different strains that can be treated in different ways.
- 2010: SickKids partnered with Hamad Medical Corporation in Qatar to advise on the creation of a state-of-the-art children’s hospital in the Middle East.
Read more about this topic: Hospital For Sick Children
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