Boston Children’s has always embodied a culture of innovation and scientific discovery, with the goal of improving the lives of children and families. Explore the timeline below to learn about a sampling of these historic breakthroughs.
1869
First patients
Boston Children’s Hospital admits its first patients to a small, brick townhouse in the city’s South End, with space for 20 patient beds. Then simply known as “The Children’s Hospital” it is one of the first medical institutions solely dedicated to the care of children in the nation.
1914
Longwood Avenue
After several moves and growth spurts, Boston Children’s settles into its current location on Longwood Avenue. The Hunnewell Building pictured here is the oldest continually occupied building on campus. When it was built, the Longwood Medical Area was mostly farmland, and the hospital grazed its own cows to ensure a safe milk supply for patients.
1935
Anesthesia for children
Before pediatric anesthesia was an established specialty, children were anesthetized with ether, using one-size-fits-all equipment. Nurse anesthetist Betty Lank designed child-sized masks and blood-pressure cuffs, and became the first person in the US to use cyclopropane, an improved anesthetic, with children. Alongside Robert M. Smith, Boston Children’s first full-time physician anesthesiologist-in-chief, Lank helped greatly improve the monitoring and safety standards for children during surgery.
1938
A bold leap forward for heart surgery
On an August morning, Chief Surgical Resident Robert Gross went against his boss’s wishes and performed the first patent ductus arteriosus repair. This bold decision allowed his patient, 7-year-old Lorraine Sweeney, to become the world’s first survivor of surgery for a congenital heart defect. This opened the door for the new field of heart surgery around the world. Gross and his successors continued to make history with contributions like the first aortic graft and the first open-heart surgery on a newborn.
1948
Antifolate, chemotherapy and a cure for leukemia
Sidney Farber was the chief of pathology at Boston Children’s at a time when a leukemia diagnosis was a death sentence. But his hunch that antifolate could potentially be a cure for acute lymphoblastic leukemia led to the first clinical trials to show that a drug could treat cancer. Farber’s work helped establish the field of chemotherapy, and brought us a future were 80 to 90 percent of children with leukemia are cured.
1949
A nobel effort to develop vaccines
Thomas Weller and his boss, the great virologist John Enders, were experimenting with chicken pox when Weller added poliovirus to a few flasks of leftover culture medium. The poliovirus grew, opening the door for the development of polio vaccines. The discovery earned Weller, Enders and their colleague Frederick Robbins the Nobel Prize, and led to an explosion of vaccine development.
1959
Premature infants and the importance of bubbles
While investigating pulmonary edemas, a buildup of fluid in the lungs , Mary Ellen Avery realized that although people with this condition can literally foam at the mouth, very premature babies had the opposite problem: their lungs made no bubbles. Avery discovered that preemies’ lungs lacked surfactant, a foamy substance that allows lungs to inflate after they exhale. Others would develop treatments based on her work, and premature babies now receive surfactant minutes after they’re born.
1971
The importance of angiogenesis in cancer
Chief of Surgery Judah Folkman published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that was met with skepticism. Eventually it would revolutionize our understanding of cancer. Folkman posited that angiogenesis, the growth of new blood vessels, was the critical event that turned cancer from harmless to potentially deadly. His work isolating the stimulators and inhibitors of angiogenesis would result in life-extending treatments and pave the way for angiogenesis research around the world.
1972
From rigid metal to the Boston Brace
When Boston Children’s scoliosis clinic opened in the 1890s, nonsurgical treatment was a rigid jacket made from plaster. By the 1970s, treatment options hadn’t improved much, as the most common brace combined a girdle, metal rod and neck ring. But when a teen patient refused to wear the brace, Chief of Orthopedics John E. Hall and orthotist Bill Miller designed a lower-profile, more comfortable brace. This Boston Brace turned out to be more effective and is now the most widely used brace around the world.
1983
Sickle cell disease meets its match
As a kid, Claudia De Pass was spending more time in the hospital than at school due to sickle cell disease. But then she became the first sickle cell patient to take hydroxyurea. The drug changed her life — and the lives of patients around the world. Hydroxyurea was a blood cancer drug when Chief of Hematology and Oncology David Nathan advocated trying it for sickle cell disease. It is the primary sickle cell treatment today.
2001
Fetal intervention
When Jennifer and Henry Miller’s baby was diagnosed prenatally with a condition that would lead to Hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS), they contacted Wayne Tworetzky, director of the Fetal Cardiology Program. Tworetzky proposed a daring solution: correct the defect in utero. On November 21, 2001, Jack Miller was born with a healthy heart, the first successful fetal correction of HLHS.
2004
Multi-organ transplant first
Children’s surgeons perform New England’s first multivisceral organ transplant when an 11-month-old boy receives a stomach, pancreas, liver and small intestine from a single donor.
2015
A new understanding of Alzheimer’s disease
Neuroscientist Dr. Beth Stevens wins the MacArthur “Genius” Award for defining the role of microglia in synapse pruning in development and Alzheimer’s disease.
2022
Universal antibody development has big vaccine impact
The Fred Alt Laboratory develops a universal antibody that neutralizes all SARS-CoV-2 variants. Their studies showed the antibody, called SP1-77, critically blocks membrane fusion from the virus to the host, suggesting therapeutic potential. Likewise, the way the antibody binds may inform future vaccine strategies.
