Its beginnings were humble and stark, even for 1875 — a two-storey, rented downtown Toronto house, with six cots, no running water and a second-hand oil stove. From this bare-bones establishment — dedicated to the care of poor, ill children — would arise Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, world renowned for its cutting edge treatments and medical research.
Its first 75 years — before moving to its current location on University Ave. — saw huge changes in the arc of care that started with the idea of doing good Christian charity and evolved into the best non-sectarian approach to treatment that science and medical resolve can offer.
First came Elizabeth McMaster, the daughter of a minister, mother of three and wife of a Toronto businessman. She organized a ladies committee that visited and tried to help poor families with sick children. That wasn’t so unusual for Victorian women interested in charitable outreach but McMaster and her group were the first lay women in the city to take it a step farther and actually start a dedicated children’s hospital in a rental house.
The women on the committee (many from prominent, religious, well-heeled Protestant families) contributed funds and also quietly solicited them through donation boxes placed at various sites. There would be discreet fundraising events (like garden parties) and sponsorships of “cots’’ — $100 covered one child’s care in a bed, or cot, for a year. They also accepted goods, such as soap and bedding. Someone even donated a “parlour organ” that aided little patients’ renditions of “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” according to an account in SickKids, the History of the Hospital for Sick Children (2016) by David Wright.
The first admission on April 3, 1875 was Maggie, 3, a scalding victim. Another 43 would follow that first year and more than 60 others treated on an outpatient basis. In addition to committee volunteers doing physical care, other ladies ensured daily prayers were said. Prominent physicians helped at the hospital on a rotating basis.
By 1876, demand for services required the move to another house on Seaton St. and a third move to a house on Elizabeth St. in 1878. By 1880, hospital records indicate 66 patients were admitted and treated and 617 were treated on an outpatient basis. Ailments ranged from burns and broken limbs to poisonings, lung inflammations and more.
In 1881, the province decided the hospital fit the definition of a charity under the provincial Charity Aid Act and started granting it two cents per day for each patient treated. Poor parents were still not charged, but parents of means were expected to contribute.
The Ladies Committee relinquished control, in 1891, to a board of trustees, which included the wealthy, influential John Ross Robertson, publisher of the Evening Telegram, and a primary benefactor of the hospital. In 1883 he had financed the construction of The Lakeside Home for Little Children on Toronto Island, which took in convalescing SickKids patients all summer. McMaster, who did not get along with Robertson, resigned in 1892.
Robertson had spearheaded the construction of a new hospital at College and Elizabeth Sts. — helped by a $20,000 municipal grant to commemorate the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, which stipulated a name change to “The Victoria Hospital for Sick Children” (although “Victoria’’ never stuck).
The new hospital opened in 1891 and Robertson was chairman of the trustees until his 1918 death. (The Star’s obituary noted that Robertson used to visit the hospital’s children every Sunday and they would excitedly cry: “Mr Wobson! Mr Wobson!”)
The 1900s saw many advances at SickKids. In 1908 the hospital started pasteurizing milk at the College St. facility — 30 years before the province made it mandatory. The first research lab at the hospital was set up in 1918. The use of “living tissue sutures” was developed in 1922 by SickKids’ Dr. William Gallie. A 1959 Star article noted that Gallie had once commented that the idea of taking living tissue and using it in surgery, instead of catgut, came about from “watching someone darn a hole in socks with a cross stitch.”
After the discovery of insulin in 1921 by Dr. Charles Best and Dr. Frederick Banting (who had served his internship at SickKids in 1919), Banting joined the staff in 1923. He worked with Dr. Gladys Boyd and a program they developed resulted in a 50 per cent decrease in diabetes-related child mortality over a 10-year period.
Lab research done by SickKids’ chief physician Dr. Alan Brown and pediatricians Dr. Fred Tisdall and Dr. Theodore Drake led in 1930 to the development of a nutritional breakthrough for babies — a low cost, pre-cooked cereal (called Pablum, from the Latin word for food, pabulum). The epitome of bland, it was easily digested and contained all the vitamins and minerals to prevent malnutrition, death and scourges, such as rickets. A 1934 Star drugstore ad listed one pound of pablum for 45 cents. Royalties flowed back to the hospital for 25 years.
Also in the early 1930s, SickKids’ Dr. John Ross discovered the lead paint used in toys and baby furniture was poisoning children. He developed a test to detect lead poisoning and his work helped persuade the Ontario government to ban, in 1935, lead-based paint from being used in children’s toys and furniture.
The ’30s would also bring one of SickKids’ biggest challenges of the decade — how to cope with the 1937 North America poliomyelitis epidemic — or “infantile paralysis” as it was commonly called then. There had been polio outbreaks in Canada before but the summer of 1937 was the worst to date for Ontario children, with more than 2,500 cases provincially, with more than 750 in Toronto. More than 100 children would die in the province, with about 40 of those from Toronto.
The hospital had been part of a province-approved trial in 1937, involving 5,000 children getting a “preventive” nasal spray, which turned out to be a failure and damaged the sense of smell in some.
SickKids had obtained an “iron lung” machine in 1930 — the only one in Canada — in which a child with a polio-compromised respiratory system, could be placed and it would artificially contract and expand the lungs. Only the child’s head was free. It wasn’t a cure but it could prolong life.
Because of the epidemic, machines on order were not yet available so the hospital decided to construct its own in a basement workshop. The first was a wooden box quickly built for a 3-year-old, John Gordon, with chest paralysis. He was stabilized. In a poignant front page story in the Aug. 28, 1937 Star, his mother “begs wealthy” to donate money so the hospital could build more “lumber lungs” to save others.
By the time the epidemic faded in the fall, 27 iron lungs (made of metal) had been built at the children’s hospital, according to SickKids historical author David Wright.
Polio survivors often needed extensive rehabilitative therapy. Some ended up at the “Country Branch of The Hospital for Sick Children,” which opened in 1928 (and ran until 1957) in Thistletown, at the site of a former farm 13 miles northwest of the downtown facility. By this time, the island summer hospital had closed.
Patients needing more long-term care, such as those with tuberculosis and asthma, were sent there with a belief that sunshine and fresh air would also help. Entertainers such as Roy Rogers and Trigger and Elsie the Cow would visit — Elsie once actually walking through a ward.
The Country Branch helped relieve some of the pressure on the hospital but by the 1940s, Toronto’s exploding population had put SickKids in crisis mode. Wright’s history notes that in 1944 a number of doctors complained to the hospital board that the building was a “veritable fire trap … dirty and infested with vermin” with overcrowded wards, where rats were occasionally seen.
It was around this time the hospital’s board began seriously pursuing a site for a new hospital, eventually securing 555 University Ave. and in June, 1945, major fundraising began with a goal of $6 million. By August, $7 million had been raised, but even before the soil could be turned, postwar inflation pushed costs up. Also, more land had to be purchased.
A second fundraising launched in 1949. The Star’s Jack Brehl got behind it and a front page Dec. 31, 1949 Star story urged readers to donate. To cut costs (now an estimated $12.5 million), Brehl wrote, “ceilings were lowered in certain floors to shorten walls and save bricks and plaster, doors have been left off many of the closets and staff offices.”
The campaign would be successful and on Jan. 15, 1951, the new Hospital for Sick Children was officially opened.
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