IN THE SERVICE OF CHILDREN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 719, 24 April 1953, Page 21

IN THE SERVICE OF CHILDREN

MENTION Great Ormond Street to a Londoner and he will think at once of the Hospital for Sick Children which has made its name famous throughout the world. The poor quarters of London were a festering warren of alleys and courts-a death trap for children — when Dr. Charles West founded this hospital in a large house that was being used as a dance hall. That was 100 years ago. To mark the anniversary the BBC broadcast last year a feature about the hospital, which is now to be heard from National stations of the NZBS, starting from 3YA at 8.0 p.m. on Thursday, April 30 (and replaying from the same station the following Sunday). At his hospital Dr. West was able to have the control over the nursing conditions of his little patients that would

give them a chance of life. Great Ormond Street, which started with 10 cots: for in-patients and an out-patients’ department, became not only a hospital but a centre for medical research into the diseases of children. Its fame spread all over the world. Doctors from many lands went there to study and to take the newest ideas in cfild medicine back to their countries. Today the hospital has room for 450 beds,.more than 100 doctors, 500 nurses and a great teaching school. There is also a country branch. In Children in Hospital listeners can hear the recorded voices of children at the hospital and the country branch. They can also hear Emlyn Williams, famous for his re-creation of Charles Dickens’s public readings, give the speech that Dickens delivered at a dinner in aid of the hospital in 1858.