A century ago, most hospitals disliked admitting child patients; when they did, they consigned them to the women's wards. Commonest child's complaint was diarrhea. In those days, it was often fatal, frequently spread to patients throughout the wards. Innumerable youngsters were victims of malnutrition diseases such as rickets and scurvy, human or bovine tuberculosis (scrofula), malformations or infections of the bones, but few hospitals were equipped to deal with these maladies. Then three years after the Civil War had ended, a young veteran of Gettysburg returned to Boston from a postwar refresher tour of Europe's medical centers with a bold idea. To four skeptical colleagues, Dr. Francis Henry Brown explained his project: to found a hospital devoted to children.
"I am convinced that physiologically a child is not just a little man," he argued. "Our children are without proper medical consideration for their special needs." Finally impressed by his argument and enthusiasm, his colleagues agreed to join with him in founding Boston's Children's Hospital.
In Five Sizes. At first, they could offer few cures and, in most cases, little more than nursing-home care. But Dr. Brown lived to see his hospital help in the conquest of many of the great child-killers of its early days. This week, as Massachusetts' Governor Christian Herter and Harvard's President Nathan Pusey dedicated a new $5,000,000 building on Boston's Blackfan Street, Brown's hospital had grown into the Children's Medical Center, first of its kind in the world. The center now totals eight buildings, none architecturally impressive, all solid and utilitarian. The new unit, to serve as a children's and infants' hospital, is distinguished mainly by having much of its equipment scaled to its clientele, e.g., the beds come in five sizes.
More important than physical plant or gear has been the caliber of the men who have staffed the hospital and, more recently, the whole center. More than ever, they honor Dr. Brown's dictum that the child is not just a little man. In the early years of the century, Surgeon William Ladd wrote a new chapter in the history of his dexterous profession by developing ways to revamp malformed intestinal and bile tracts in infants. Neurosurgeon Frank Ingraham has devised a highly ingenious method of draining the fluid in hydrocephalic children from the spinal canal to the kidneys through a polyethylene tube. Pediatrician Bronson Crothers has probed the causes of cerebral palsy, is now preparing a book with 1,000 exhaustive case histories.