Rickey Lynn Hendricks - For a childs sake: history of the Childrens Hospital, Denver, Colorado, 1910-1990

1994 by the University Press of Colorado

P.O. Box 849

Niwot, Colorado 80544

All rights reserved.

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, University of Southern Colorado, and Western State College of Colorado.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hendricks, Rickey Lynn.

For a child's sake: history of the Children's Hospital, Denver, Colorado, 19101990 / Rickey Hendricks and Mark S. Foster.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-87081-349-8

1. Children's Hospital (Denver, Colo.) History. 2. Children Hospitals Colorado Denver History. I. Foster, Mark S. II. Title.

RJ28.D46H46 1994

382.1'9892'000978883dc20

94-19209

CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.481984

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Children's Hospital Association and its board of directors are pleased to dedicate this book to the many young people who, at a unique and significant moment in their lives, were patients at The Children's Hospital of Denver.

Today I had lively telephone visits with three individuals who live in Denver and were patients at The Children's Hospital. Mary Jean Nicely is eighty-one years old; Edgar Biggs Sheldon is seventy-six; Derry "Rooster" Felton is ten years old and was discharged last week, having sacrificed his angry appendix to the cause of science.

These three people don't know one another but as patients they share a common bond. Mary Jean and Edgar were hospitalized in the small rooms of the remodeled brownstone residence at 2221 Downing that had, with moderate but exultant fanfare, opened its doors to "the sick babies and little ones of Denver" on February 17, 1910. Oca Cushman, R.N. and first superintendent, who at the time began a disciplined love affair with The Children's Hospital that lasted nearly fifty years, led the first patients inside.

When a cavalcade of "motor cars," with their exhausts billowing in the clear frigid air of February 12, 1917, and "a dozen doctors" arrived to transport the entire patient population of thirty from the quickly outgrown facility to the gleaming new hospital at Nineteenth Avenue and Downing Street, Mary Jean and Edgar were among those present. Mary Jean was flat on her back with tuberculosis of the spine; Edgar had his hands restrained to keep him from digging at his severe generalized eczema.

Mary Jean remembers the trip well. She was wrapped in blankets, and Dr. John Amesse carried her out to the car because he was her pediatrician. Edgar's memories of the long-awaited move are distillations of what he was told by his parents when he was older. "And Doc," he told me over the phone, "my eczema never really did go away."

Derry's recollections are as crisp as yesterday's newspaper, intensified by discomfort and the threat of the unknown, but softened by caring hands. I asked him about the food. "It was OK," he proclaimed, "but my mom's is better." (So much for hospital cuisine!) "The nurses were nice; one of them looks like my aunt who lives in Des Moines.''

The kaleidoscopic events taking place between the hospitalizations of these three children the unpredictable and implacable march of eighty years constitute almost the entire life of The Children's Hospital. Herodotus argued that he wrote of the ancient Greeks to secure for them "the honor of remembrance." The Children's Hospital of today is steadfastly going about the heady business of creating its own past: "glimmers in the misty great seas of recollection."