page_title: The Hospital for Sick Children (Toronto)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: The Hospital for Sick Children (Toronto) / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Victoria Hospital for Sick Children (old HSC building), Toronto, in 2005.
context_page_description: The Hospital for Sick Children, corporately branded as SickKids, is a major pediatric teaching hospital located on University Avenue in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Toronto.
  The hospital's Peter Gilgan Centre for Research and Learning is believed to be the largest pediatric research tower in the world at 69,677.28 square metres. Founded in 1875, the hospital was inspired by the example of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.
  The hospital is located in the Discovery District of Downtown Toronto on University Avenue, adjacent to the Toronto General Hospital and across from Mount Sinai Hospital and the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre—collectively forming a complex known as Hospital Row, each connected by tunnels and bridges. The hospital is known for its advertisement campaigns and the largest amounts of donations received for any Canadian hospital.
context_section_description: During the spring of 1875, an eleven-room house was rented for $320 a year by a Toronto women's bible study group led by Elizabeth McMaster. They set up six iron cots and "declared open a hospital 'for the admission and treatment of all sick children.'" Their first patient, a scalding victim named Maggie, came in on April 3. Forty-four patients were admitted to the Hospital in its first year of operation and sixty-seven others were treated in outpatient clinics.
  In 1876 the hospital moved to larger facilities. In 1891 the hospital moved from rented premises to a building constructed for it at College and Elizabeth streets where it would remain for sixty years. This old building, known as the Victoria Hospital for Sick Children, is now the Toronto area headquarters of Canadian Blood Services. In 1951 the hospital moved to its present University Avenue location, on the grounds where Canadian-born movie star Mary Pickford's childhood home once stood.
  In 1972, the hospital was equipped with a rooftop helipad (CNW8). Today, it is one of two downtown Toronto hospitals with a helipad (the other being St. Michael's Hospital) and one of three in Toronto (the third being at Sunnybrook Hospital).
  SickKids Hospital underwent a major expansion in 1993 with the construction of a glass-roofed atrium on the east side of the main building. In late 2008, the hospital underwent a major renovation in the emergency wing.
caption: Victoria Hospital for Sick Children
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