Campaign by prominent Adelaide women raises funds to fill desperate need for a children's hospital, opened in 1879
Adelaide Children's Hospital (now the Women's and Children's Hospital) opened in 1879 in North Adelaide.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
Seven wives with prominent 19th Century South Australian names (Colton, Campbell, Fowler, Jeffries, Knight, Stuckey, Smedley), along with Mary Ashley (from the Church of Christ) and Dr Allan Campbell from the new board of health met in 1876 to begin planning for the desperately needed Adelaide Children’s Hospital.
Poor quality of life and premature death for poor children pushed the health board to secured a hospital site in North Adelaide.
Over two years, the female visionaries campaigned, supported by the medical profession and luminaries such as Robert Barr Smith. to raise the £2,500 needed to build the hospital’s first Samuel Way Building, opened with 24 beds in 1879. It also was the first hospital to start nursing training, although slender, from 1879. Martha Bidmead, one of its nurses graduates in 1887, led a six South Australian nurses who served during the Boer War (1899-1902).
Another graduate was Kate Hill, who became head nurse in 1887. After 15 months away at Wakefield Street private hospital, Hill returned in 1891 as superintendent of nurses (the first trained nurse appointed as matron since 1885 when a house surgeon took over nurse training). Hill brought “zeal, fidelity, diligence and kindness” and an “ability to educate and command without alienating the sympathies of her subordinates” in halcyon years (1893-99) for the children’s hospital with a new wing gifted by John Howard Angas. The Kate Hill board was started by the Adelaide Children's Hospital nurses' association in 1939, honours each year's outstanding student.
By 1893, the hospital board of management, agreeing that “the spirit of the rules of the Hospital will not be violated by the appointment of a lady”, employed South Australia's first female medical school graduate Laura Fowler (her mother was on the original fundraising committee).
Adelaide Children's Hospital took a lead in local medical science when its honorary bacteriologist Thomas Borthwick brought his equipment to set up the Thomas Elder laboratory in 1894. The hospital’s strong work into paediatric research and development intensified in 1964 with a floor in the Rieger Building occupied by Adelaide University’s department of paediatrics.
Until 1955, parents were able to visit their children only two days each week and it wasn't until the 1970s that parents became closely involved in the care and comfort of their hospitalised children.
The hospital also later ran the Queen Victoria Convalescent Home for Children at Mount Lofty, Mareeba Babies Hospital and Estcourt House at Tennyson. Fundraising for the expanding c hospital became a state-wide focus in the 20th Century with radio and television stations’ Easter appeal.
In 1989, the Adelaide Children’s Hospital and the Queen Victoria Hospital amalgamated to become the Women’s and Children’s Hospital. Its foundation was reborn to raise ten of millions of dollars for the hospital and families that use it in South Australia, the Northern Territory, Broken Hill and the Sunraysia region in Victoria.
