Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children is the most famous medical institution in Canada. In addition to being the largest paediatric centre in Canada it has earned an international reputation for clinical care and research that has influenced generations of health care practitioners across the country and around the world. In a very real sense, hospital staff have touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of children and their families.

From its humble origins in rented houses in Victorian Toronto, the hospital flourished to become an influential paediatric institution, pioneering pasteurization, the iron lung for polio patients, Pablum, the Mustard procedure for “blue babies” born with congenital heart malformations, and research on the genetic basis for diseases such as cystic fibrosis. It was also the site of two of the most famous medical controversies in modern Canadian history – the suspected murder of two dozen babies in the early 1980s and, later, the whistle-blowing controversy involving research scientist Nancy Olivieri.

David Wright chronicles SickKids’ remarkable history, including its triumphs and tragedies, its discoveries and dead ends. In doing so, Wright has crafted a compelling and accessible history of SickKids that anchors Toronto’s children’s hospital within the broader changes affecting Canadian society and medical practice over the last century and a half.

David Wright is a professor of history and Canada Research Chair in the History of Health Policy at McGill University