The Hospital for Sick Children

The Hospital for Sick Children opened in 1875 in a rented house on Avenue Street with just six beds, founded by Elizabeth McMaster and a group of Toronto women at a time when no dedicated children's hospital existed anywhere in Canada. It moved locations several times as it grew, eventually settling into its current University Avenue campus, and became affiliated with the University of Toronto's medical school, giving it a research mandate alongside its clinical one from early in its history.

A research powerhouse

SickKids researchers have been credited with a string of major medical advances over the following century, including work in the 1930s establishing pasteurized milk formula fortified with vitamin D to prevent rickets in infants, and decades later, the identification of the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis in 1989, a discovery made at the hospital's research institute. It remains one of the largest pediatric research hospitals in the world and a major children's health referral centre for Ontario and beyond.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Hospital for Sick Children
• Wikipedia — Hospital for Sick Children

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