At the Children's Hospital.
Convalescent home, Highgate.
"
E want to move Johnny to a place where there are
none but children; a place set up on purpose for sick children; where the good doctors and nurses pass their lives with children, talk to none but children, touch none but children, comfort and cure none but children."
Who does not remember that chapter in "Our Mutual Friend" in which Charles Dickens described Johnny's removal—with his Noah's Ark and his noble wooden steed—from the care of poor old Betty to that of the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond-street? Johnny is dead—he died after bequeathing all his dear possessions, the Noah's Ark, the gallant horse, and the yellow bird, to his little sick neighbour—and his large-hearted creator is dead too; but the Hospital in Great Ormond-street still exists—in a finer form than Dickens knew it—and still receives sick children to be comforted and cured by its gentle nurses and good doctors.
And this is how the very first Hospital for Children came to be founded. Some fifty years ago, Dr. Charles West, a physician extremely interested in children and their ailments, was walking with a companion along Great Ormond-street. He stopped opposite the stately old mansion known as No. 49, which was then "to let," and said, "There! That is the future Children's Hospital. It can be had cheap, I believe, and it is in the midst of a district teeming with poor." The house was known to the Doctor as one with a history. It had been the residence of a great and kindly man—the famous Dr. Richard Mead, Court Physician to Queen Anne and George the First, and it is described by a chronicler of the time as a "splendidly-fitted mansion, with spacious gardens looking out into the fields" of St. Pancras. Another notable tenant of the mansion was the Rev. Zachary Macaulay, father of Lord Macaulay, and a co-worker with Clarkson and Wilberforce for the abolition of slavery.
Dr. Charles West pushed his project for
