Sick Kids: The History of the Hospital for Sick Children by David Wright (review)

Everything that can go wrong with commissioned institutional histories usually does. Sponsors choose bad authors, authors fail to perform, sponsors and authors turn on one another, the books do not get written. Or they get written badly, ending up as one-dimensional celebrations of fifty, 100, 150, and so on years of institutional achievement. Lavish illustrations, great length, and exhaustive indexes mask bad writing and worse interpretation. Perhaps no one cares, so long as the sponsors have a product to give away during their centennial, sesquicentennial, bicentennial, and so on celebrations.

Having been burdened, and burned, so often by having to review or blurb institutional histories, I had misgivings about getting involved with David Wright’s commissioned history of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. The first chapter, setting the British context for the emergence of a Toronto children’s hospital in the 1870s, was not hugely encouraging. It seemed a little too academic–sound history, impeccable understanding of the right questions to ask, but neither gripping nor totally clear. Would lay readers be interested? Would the sponsors be happy?

How wrong I was. The further I got into Wright’s history, the more engaged I became with the prose that, in fact, combines splendid scholarship with compelling readability and wise judgment. Sick Kids: The History of the Hospital for Sick Children becomes difficult to put down, which is the highest praise I can give for an institutional history. It is a splendid achievement (and, yes, its illustrations and index are superb, its length just right), a credit to both the author’s skills and the hospital’s belief that it was important to have a professional historian write its history. Its readership will be wide; its contributions to various areas of social and medical history are substantial.

Sick Kids opened in 1875 in rented houses in downtown Toronto as a charitable enterprise, founded by deeply religious women, aimed at bringing medical care to disadvantaged children. Childhood had become conceptualized as a distinct period of life. The work of the hospital reflected an ongoing dialectic between health care’s expanding capabilities and shifting patterns of infant and childhood ailments.

David Wright is a senior medical historian (currently chair of the History Department at McGill University) who won a competition to undertake this project. He blends chronology and themes in beautifully crafted chapters, outlining the hospital’s early emphasis on orthopaedic work (club feet and crooked limbs), the struggles against the ravages of infectious disease that led to pioneering public health engagement as well as a research interest in pure food (the Pablum story is not at all bland), the resurgence of surgical excellence after the Second World War, and the hospital’s transformation in our time into a global centre of advanced paediatric research and tertiary care.

This summary does not do justice to the dimensions of Wright’s narrative. With remarkable adroitness he captures multiple dimensions of the patient, parent, physician, nurse, and benefactor experience at Sick Kids, and these are not just tear-jerking, heart-warming stories. The hospital was often deeply troubled. Its early years saw a takeover of the institution by the dictatorial newspaper baron and philanthropist, John Ross Robertson. As the hospital’s physical plant went through multiple configurations, working and living conditions and standards of care were often far from ideal. In the 1980s, the hospital was wracked by an incredible scandal when it was believed that one or more nurses had been serially murdering babies with overdoses of digoxin. In the 1990s, researchers at the institution managed to discredit themselves and their calling by behaving like characters in a bad television drama. And the profound philanthropic impulse that makes children’s hospitals “the sweetest of all charities” did not prove immune to fads, foibles, and failures.

Wright manages to end his book leaving most readers convinced that they now understand the...