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Children's Hospital sees huge jumps in technology during its 100 years

By Debra Melani, Special to the Rocky

Published September 21, 2008 at 3 p.m.

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Entertainment of all types has been presented to patients at Children's Hospital over the years, including a circus visit in the 1940s.

Photo by Children's Hospital

Entertainment of all types has been presented to patients at Children's Hospital over the years, including a circus visit in the 1940s.

Dr. David Goldberg greets 19-month-old Gabriel Basquez and his grandmother, Lydia Martinez, at Children's Hospital, where the pediatric cardiology department is lauded internationally.

Photo by Ellen Jaskol / The Rocky

Dr. David Goldberg greets 19-month-old Gabriel Basquez and his grandmother, Lydia Martinez, at Children's Hospital, where the pediatric cardiology department is lauded internationally.

Dr. Seymour Wheelock, 90, was a patient as a baby in 1918.

Dr. Seymour Wheelock, 90, was a patient as a baby in 1918.

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Remember Mary Poppins' little "spoonful of sugar" tune? It's easier to understand if you've been around awhile - say, a century. Back then, medicine tasted awful, and it didn't come in bubble-gum flavor to help it go down.

The Children's Hospital has come a long way since relying on bad-tasting remedies for its tiny patients. Medical milestones punctuate the pediatric facility's history, which began humbly 100 years ago in a renovated Denver home.

Children's soon left that 30-bed beginning for a 19th Avenue and Downing Street location, where it grew for decades, earning and retaining a spot as one of the nation's top pediatric hospitals. Along with its 100th anniversary as a hospital, Children's on Sept. 29 celebrates its first year in its grand new home - a 1.4-million-square-foot, 270-bed facility at I-225 and East Colfax Avenue in Aurora.

In recognition of the celebration, we take a peek at the past and compare it to today, highlighting just a few of many areas of transformation in the hospital's long history.

The oldest living patient

In 1918, a frazzled mother walked into the Children's Hospital with a fussy baby. The sympathetic staff assured the woman it would be all right.

"It was probably just colic," said Dr. Seymour Wheelock, 90, a Denver resident who was that colicky baby. He was kept overnight for observation. "You wouldn't see that happen today."

Wheelock, believed to be the hospital's oldest living patient, knows he should be glad it was only a little gas. He went on to become a doctor, pioneering an adolescent department at Children's Hospital.

Although considered high-tech at the time, Children's Hospital then presented a starkly different picture for its parents rushing tots in for emergency care:

No equipment beeped. No ventilators hummed. Doctors employed archaic elixirs - such as boric acid for disinfectant gargles, and wood creosote to quiet coughs. Physicians washed their hands in basins. Patients were crammed together in rooms, and many diseases were killers.

"The most deadly were the infections caused by bacteria, because (doctors) didn't have antibiotics," said Dr. Chris Nyquist, a pediatric infectious disease specialist with Children's for the past 16 years. So there was no way to treat the big bacterial killers of the day, such as pneumonia, meningitis, diphtheria and tuberculosis, she said.

And viral illnesses? "Viruses weren't even discovered yet."

Today, vaccines have eradicated many of those killers. And for those that still linger, doctors at Children's have top-of-the-line equipment, powerful drugs and fine-tuned protocol for controlling infectious disease.

"You could ramble on forever about the technology," said Wheelock, who retired in 1983. Of the hospital's new, state-of-the-art facility, he said, "It's brilliant."

Today, children with infectious diseases are greeted by staff equipped with masks and hand-sanitizing gels, then quickly triaged and placed in their own quarters.

Even some of the rooms are high-tech, with negative airflow for highly contagious patients (keeping the bad germs in), and positive airflow for immune-compromised patients (keeping the bad germs out).

The ability of today's doctors to attain information with the push of a button and communicate just as quickly with doctors thousands of miles away is phenomenal, said Wheelock, whose earliest memory of the hospital had something to do with communication.

He was 5, and his parents drove him through a snowstorm to Children's for a tonsillectomy. A "pleasant" lady at the desk leaned over and said to him, "I understand that we are having our tonsils out."

Said Wheelock, "I remember thinking, How about I go home, and you have your tonsils out."

Wheelock also recalls having bad dreams from the ether used as anesthesia and thinking the needles being used on patients were about 3-feet long. And back then, parent visitation was strictly limited, he said. The new Children's Hospital provides parent beds in patient rooms and amenities like dining, laundry and Internet access.

And yet, some things remain the same, such as the way small tonsillectomy patients are bribed.

"They promised me mounds of ice cream," Wheelock said. Unfortunately, the young Wheelock's tummy was - once again - too upset.

"It was not to be."

Little hearts, big advances

Many moms get teary-eyed when they talk about their babies' births. Lisa Basquez cries.

If her child had been born 50 years earlier - or if she and her husband, Mat, had not opted for an ultrasound when 19-month-old Gabriel was in the womb - he most likely would have died.

Gabriel was born with half a heart. The Denver parents' choice was either to abort, let him die naturally after birth, or turn to technology. It was no choice at all, said Basquez.

The technological options available to parents with cardiology patients today are vast compared to the early years, said Dr. Dunbar Ivy, chief of pediatric cardiology.

"(Doctors) really had no good surgical options, no good diagnostic techniques," said Ivy, who has been with Children's since 1994.

As cardiologists of the '50s and '60s worked to unravel the puzzle of this common birth defect (which still strikes more than 40,000 babies a year), most infants with heart abnormalities died within a few days of birth.

Even technological advancements considered amazing at the time seem archaic by today's standards. For instance, before the first open-heart surgery performed at Denver's Children's Hospital in 1954, staff placed the child in a tub of ice in hopes of reducing heart-tissue damage during surgery. The patient survived; the tub technique did not.

Today, though heart defects remain the No. 1 cause of birth-defect-related deaths in the U.S., thousands of babies survive. Because so many are living near-normal life spans, hospitals have developed adult congenital heart programs, including the University of Colorado Hospital, an affiliate of Children's.

The heart-and-lung machine marked the most significant technological leap in the field. It was first conceived of in the 1930s, but was refined and increasingly used in the late '50s and early '60s. The device enabled surgeons to protect the brain and provide oxygen to patients during surgery.

To grasp the magnitude of his department's growth, Ivy said, think about the toddler in the ice tub about to undergo major surgery. "Now we do that in a heart catheter lab and the child goes home the next day."

Lisa Basquez learned unexpectedly how far Ivy's internationally recognized department had come when making arrangements to move to another state, so that Gabriel could go to a top-ranking transplant center after his birth. After a staff member asked Basquez where she was from, there was a long silence. Finally, the woman said, "I guess you're probably not aware that one of the best hospitals for pediatric transplants is right there."

Gabriel was transported to Denver's Children's Hospital (at its previous location) after birth, where staff cared for him and his parents stood vigil, until the organ donor phone call came. The Basquezes were lucky. It took only 13 days to get a heart. It often takes months, and infants die waiting.

Gabriel recovered well. He now says "Mom," "Dad" and "please," among other things, and is bursting out of toddler clothes two sizes too big for his age.

Lisa Basquez credits the hospital's care, her family's prayers and her motherly persistence for Gabriel's health.

"I can be pretty stubborn," she said. "Not getting better was not an option."

Milestones at Children's Hospital

1908: The Children's Hospital is incorporated.

1917: The hospital moves from a renovated house to 19th Avenue and Downing Street.

1937: Claude Boettcher contributes to a school for the disabled.

1942: Sister Elizabeth Kenny pioneers a revolutionary treatment for polio.

1954: Dr. John Grow performs first open-heart surgery.

1958: Dr. C. Henry Kempe founds child- abuse identification, prevention and treatment program.

1968: Children's Hospital sponsors Colorado's first amputee ski school at Arapahoe Basin.

1978: Dr. James Todd discovers and names Toxic Shock Syndrome.

2007: The hospital moves to I-225 and East Colfax Avenue.

Facts about the hospital

*The Children's Hospital was the 16th children's hospital founded in the United States.

Source: National Association of Children's Hospitals and Related Institutions (NACHRI)

*$194,000: Cost to build Children's Hospital when it relocated to 19th Avenue and Downing Street, in 1917.

*$560 million: Cost to build the current Children's Hospital at I-225 and East Colfax Avenue, in 2007.

Inpatient admissions, then and now

*1910 - 290 patients admitted

*1951 - 8,776

*2006 - 9,941 (plus 343,328 outpatient visits)

More medical staff

*1897 - 6 staff members

*1951 - 362

*2006 - 1,088

Average Length of Stay

*1910 - 24.5 days

*1954 - 5.9 days

*2006 - 6.6 days