page_title: Charles West (physician)
section_title: The Hospital for Sick Children
hierarchical_section_title: Charles West (physician) / Life / The Hospital for Sick Children
caption_attribution_description: View of "49 Great Ormond Street, 1882, Dr Mead's House. French Embassy, next door" (colour) General Collections Keywords: J. P. Emslie; great ormond street hospital, origins
context_page_description: "One of the men who have helped to make the reign of Queen Victoria a memorable period in the history of medical progress"
  — The British Medical Journal, 2 April 1898
  Charles West was a British physician, specialized in pediatrics and obstetrics, especially known as the founder of the first children's hospital in Great Britain, the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street, London.
context_section_description: After some unfortunate attempts to transform the Waterloo Dispensary for children into a hospital, he decided to start a fundraising campaign in order to establish in London a hospital specifically for children. Also due to his remarkable oratorical gifts, West’s campaign had success and, in the spring of 1851, a little hospital with ten beds was opened at 49 Great Ormond Street, in a house that had belonged to Richard Mead. In 1854, after three years of activity, Charles West - who was the first physician of the hospital - could describe the initial success of the structure. He also took advantage from this success to boost research funds in view of further enlargement:
  "The Hospital for Sick Children, which was opened in the year 1851 in Great Ormond Street, Queen Square (…) was the first hospital for children ever established in this country. The poor now flock to it, sick children from all parts of London are brought to it. The out-patients in the first year were 1252, in the second 4251; during nine months only of the third year they already amount to between 5 and 6000; but still the want of funds limits the numbers who are received into it, and only thirty beds can be kept open for in-patients. Thirty beds! when more than 21,000 children die every year in this metropolis under ten years of age; and when this mortality falls thrice as heavily on the poor as on the rich! But alas, the tables of mortality do not tell the whole of the sad tale. It is not only because so many children die, that this Hospital was founded; but because so many are sick; because they languish in their homes; a burden to their parents who have no leisure to tend them, no means to minister to their wants. The one sick child weighs down the whole family; it keeps the father poor, the home wretched. (…) Do not then let this Hospital fail for want of funds. Visit it for yourselves: see what its daily working is, read the simple tale of good done which its Reports unfold; and then, if you feel for the poor, if you love little children, if you have children of your own, or have had, and lost them, or have had them given back to you when you feared that they would be taken from you for ever — let every motive which policy can suggest, which philanthropy can furnish, affection enforce, or religion sanctify, induce you to join with the Committee, and give them what best you can contribute, your time, your influence, or your money, to forward them in their work.
  — Charles West
  .
  Thanks to his tireless activity, the hospital continued to grow in size and prestige, becoming until today one of the world's leading pediatric facilities.
caption: The Hospital for Sick Children in 1882
exif: {}