[ back ]

Changing Times, A Constant Mission

Children’s Huntington Avenue location, c. 1900. Surgical team performs an operation c. 1920. Outpatients in the 1940's.

The Wellesley Convalescent Home, 1913 Circus Day, c.1930 1950’s polio patients

hildren’s Hospital Boston traces its origins to 1868, when four men met at the home of Dr. Francis Henry Brown to discuss how to improve health care for Boston’s children.
Their proposal for a new hospital
emphasized three things:

• The medical and surgical treatment of the diseases of children
• The attainment and diffusion of knowledge regarding these diseases
• The training of young women in the duties of nursing for children.

Their dream was realized in 1869, when The Children’s Hospital opened as a 20-bed facility on Rutland Street in Boston’s South End. Children’s moved to Huntington Avenue (next to present-day Symphony Hall) in 1882, before building the Hunnewell building on Longwood Avenue in 1914.

A few of Children’s notable contributions to the field of medicine:

1920 Dr. William Ladd develops procedures for correcting various congenital defects, launching the specialty of pediatric surgery.

1938 Dr. Robert Gross performs the first successful surgery to correct a congenital cardiovascular defect.

1947 Dr. Sidney Farber achieves the first successful remission of pediatric leukemia.

1971 Dr. Judah Folkman publishes his hypothesis that tumors grow by recruiting blood vessels, ushering in the field of angiogenesis and a new approach to the treatment of cancer and other diseases.

1984 Children’s surgeons perform the first pediatric liver transplantation in an infant.

2004 The Karp Family Research Laboratories opens, where Children’s researchers are continuing our tradition of innovation and discovery.

The polio epidemics
Beginning in 1916, a series of polio epidemics brought thousands of patients to Children’s. In its most serious form, this mysterious virus caused respiratory paralysis.

Diagnosis and treatment by Children’s experts was in great demand, since few clinicians in Massachusetts were familiar with the disease. In 1932, a room-sized “iron lung” was installed and was in “practically continuous operation from the first of June to the first of January,” during the epidemic of 1935, according to Children’s then physician-in-chief Kenneth Blackfan, MD.

In 1949, Children’s John Enders, PhD, and his colleagues successfully cultured the polio virus, which led to a vaccine and the eradication of the disease in the Western hemisphere. They were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery in 1954.

To learn more, see the exhibit on Dr. Enders and his discoveries currently on display in the lobby of the John F. Enders Pediatric Research Laboratories.