The Children’s Hospital Colorado: Pioneering Medicine “for a Child’s Sake”

Consistently ranked among the top children’s hospitals in the United States, Children’s Hospital Colorado is a private non-profit organization affiliated with the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, located at the Anschutz Medical Campus and adjacent to a rapidly-expanding bioscience park at the former Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora. The hospital’s first site in a rented home on Denver’s Capitol Hill in 1910 was succeeded by a purpose-built, state of-the-art facility just as America entered World War I in 1917.

Founded by a core group of Denver society matrons active in the early 20th c. women’s suffrage movement, the health facility reflected a changing attitude toward childhood as a distinct developmental stage of human development. Urbanization, Immigration, Social Gospel and Progressive themes run through its history. Equally as important to its long-term success, regulation and licensure of nurses and physicians, and later accreditation of hospitals themselves, became the hallmark of all future institutional policies and practices. Ms. Steele will link the particular case of this hospital to Colorado and 20th c. medical history in a broader social context.