An inspiring book celebrates 140 years of Melbourne’s beloved Royal Children’s Hospital.  Brigid O’Connell from the Sunday Herald Sun reports.

It came very close to not even getting off the ground.

The Royal Children’s Hospital may now be synonymous with dedication to children’s health, but a groundswell of disapproval bubbled among doctors in the late 1800s, fuelled by fears a hospital solely for children would cause damage by separating mother and child, isolating them from therapeutic home comforts.

Gold rushes around that time had made Melbourne one of the richest and fastest growing cities in the world and yet the prevalence of infectious diseases during the 1870s meant half of all deaths in Victoria were of children under five.

The gentrified suburbs where terraces now demand a lazy million dollars were once the suburbs where a quarter of all babies didn’t survive to their first birthday.

But in 1870, with the backing of some notable doctors who had seen the success of dedicated children’s hospitals overseas, the Melbourne Free Hospital for Sick Children was finally opened.

On the Royal Children’s Hospital’s 140th anniversary, with construction well under way for its new billion dollar site, we look at the hospital’s rise from a six-bed facility funded by the sale of raffle tickets to a world-class pediatrics hospital boasting internationally recognised clinicians and researchers.

The new hospital being built in Flemington Rd, with aquarium, hotel, juice bars and single-patient rooms, is a contrast to its beginnings where visiting hours were held once a week and patients had to bring their own linen and bottles for medicine.

A History of Faith, Science and Love, written by historian Peter Yule reveals there was no grand opening ceremony for the first site –a two-storey brick building in Romeo Lane, now Crossley St between Bourke and Little Bourke that may have stood where Pellegrini’s Espresso Bar is now.

The hospital treated 1200-1500 outpatients in the first year, but soon moved to Exhibition St because of concerns the area attracted prostitutes and thieves. Whooping cough, diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhoid fever, TB and measles were the most treated conditions in the late 1880s.

A child being admitted for whopping cough could expect to be put in a closed room with a hot shovel laced with carbolic acid; a poisonous substance now used as an antiseptic or disinfectant.

Hair was cut off to prevent the spread of lice, the underdeveloped were given brandy and milk to get their strength back and spoonfuls of turpentine treated rashes.

Doctors may not have known the causes of these diseases or how to treat them; but good nursing and hygiene ensured hospitals were no longer breeding grounds for infection. Beds increased from six to 15, and outpatient attendances rose from 1726 to 7381 when the hospital moved to 13 Spring St in 1893.

About that time the hospital’s committee of management accepted a donation of land in Royal Park on the corner of Gatehouse St and The Avenue, but the area was considered too remote.

Even after six years of operation, there still wasn’t unanimous support for the hospital. Public meetings were held in September 1876 and former Justice of the Victorian Supreme Court Redmond Barry offered land around his Carlton home as the new site.

Despite fears infectious diseases would spread in the area, the hospital opened with an extra 30 beds on the land enclosed by Rathdowne, Pelham and Drummond Streets.

Different diseases arose in the early 1900s; including meningitis, the widespread 1919 influenza outbreak and Victoria’s first polio epidemic in 1908.
By the mid 1920s, more than 100,000 outpatients and 3000 inpatients were treated annually; with 60 days the average length of stay and many staying for more than a year.

With skills some doctors had learnt during World War I, attention was then on helping rehabilitate crippled children and three off-site campuses were open by the 1930s, highlighting the importance of holistic and specialised treatment.

A 16-bed Sherbrooke cottage took in the malnourished, those with chronic chest complaints and the “badly behaved’, a “sunlight therapy’ ward for polio patients was set up in Hampton and an orthopaedic unit opened on 8ha at Frankston.

The medical revolution began from the 1940s and efforts were poured into treating and researching congenital abnormalities, such as spina bifida.
Under the hospital’s first full-time salaried medical director, Prof Vernon Collins, preventative health care was introduced and the hospital opened one of the world’s first pediatric burns units.

It was becoming clear in the 1940s that the Carlton site was overcrowded and inadequate as an evolving modern teaching hospital.

Hospital committee president Dame Elisabeth Murdoch made a persuasive pitch to premier Henry Bolte in 1956 and after years of inaction and broken promises, the premier caved in to providing 3.5 million pounds over seven years for the rebuild.

Dr Hugo Gold, clinical director of the hospital’s Clinical Bioethics Centre, is the only current member of staff to have worked at the hospital in Carlton.

The 73-year-old started as a junior resident at the hospital in 1962, the year before the move, and he remembers it as an inspiring time in medicine.

“There were no CT scans, no nuclear medicine, MRIs or ultrasound. The things you could operate on were much less,’ Dr Gold said.

“It was science fiction to think of things like heart transplantation.

“But it was a really exciting time to be coming into medicine, there was a huge sense of optimism.’

See the Sunday Herald Sun article here.