Children's was founded on 20 July 1869, by Francis Henry Brown, a
Civil War surgeon, who traveled to Europe in 1867 to study the pioneering specialized approach to treating children. Brown was impressed with the treatments he witnessed and he wanted to bring that level of care to Boston. Brown opened a 20-bed facility in a small townhouse at 9 Rutland Street in
Boston's South End. Approximately one year after opening, the hospital was moved to the corner of Rutland and Washington Streets. Children's Hospital stayed at this location until 1871 when the hospital moved to Huntington Avenue before its final move to what would become the
Harvard Longwood Medical and Academic Area. In 1891
Thomas Morgan Rotch, Children's chief physician, established the nation's first laboratory for the modification and production of bacteria-free milk. Before the establishment of this laboratory,
breast milk was often the carrier of many deadly diseases that children were especially susceptible to.
1900s Harvard Medical School affiliated itself with Boston Children's in 1903. , (1914) Boston Children's Hospital moved to an area of more than 130,000 square feet on Longwood Avenue in 1914, where the Ebenezer Francis farm was located. The cost of the area was $120,000.
William Ladd, a doctor with Children's, devised procedures for correcting various
congenital defects such as
intestinal malformations in 1920, launching the specialty of
pediatric surgery.
Robert E. Gross, a surgeon at Children's and later a professor of child surgery at
Harvard Medical School, performed the world's first successful surgical procedure to correct a
congenital heart defect with the "ligation of a patent ductus arteriosus" in 1948. He achieved the world's first partial remission of acute leukemia. He went on to co-found the
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 1950.
John Enders, his assistant Thomas Weller, and colleague
Frederick Robbins, successfully cultured the
polio virus in 1949, making possible the development of the Salk and Sabin
vaccines for
polio. They won the Nobel Prize for their work in 1954. Enders and his team went on to culture the
measles virus.
Judah Folkman published "Tumor angiogenesis: Therapeutic implications" in the 1971 November issue of the
New England Journal of Medicine. It was the first paper to describe Folkman's theory that tumors recruit new
blood vessels to grow. The
Boston Brace, a new, lower profile brace for patients with scoliosis was developed by Chief of Orthopedics John E. Hall and orthotist Bill Miller at the Boston Children's scoliosis clinic in 1972.
Endostatin, one of the most potent inhibitors of blood vessel growth, is discovered by Drs. Michael O'Reilly and
Judah Folkman in 1997. offering the possibility of
cell replacement and gene therapies for patients with
neurodegenerative disease,
neural injury or
paralysis. In 1998, Children's establishes its Advanced Fetal Care Center to provide diagnostic services, genetic and obstetrical counseling, and prenatal or immediate postpartum intervention for fetuses with complex birth defects. The same year, Larry Benowitz , PhD grows
nerve cells in the damaged
spinal cords of rats, a significant step in the treatment of
spinal cord injuries. The next year, Benowitz discovers that
inosine is important in controlling axon regeneration in nerve cells.
2000–present In 2002,
Scott Pomeroy and
Todd Golub use microarray gene expression profiling to identify different types of
brain tumors and predict clinical outcome. This allows
radiation and
chemotherapy to be tailored to kill cancer cells while leaving healthy tissue alone. In 2005, in the best-documented effort to date, Drs. Felix Engel and Mark Keating get adult heart-muscle cells to divide and multiply in mammals, the first step in regenerating heart tissue. Also in 2005, neurosurgeon Benjamin Warf brought a technique back to Boston Children's for shuntlessly treating
hydrocephalus, the condition of excess fluid around the brain. The clinic provides "counseling and resources in the years before medical intervention is appropriate, along with psychological support and a stepwise approach to medical treatment." In 2016, the hospital receives approval by the Massachusetts Public Health Council for a $1 billion expansion to the
Longwood Medical and Academic Area. The hospital plans to build an 11-story building with 71 new beds, renovate part of the current campus, and build a new outpatient clinic in
Brookline, Massachusetts. == The Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center ==