The Mater Children’s Hospital

the realisation of a dream for the Sisters of Mercy

opened on 6 July 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression. Triumphs and challenges followed each other through eight decades. In 2014, the Mater Children’s Hospital and Brisbane’s earliest children’s hospital, the Royal Children’s Hospital, closed when the Queensland government’s Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital opened.
Bricks and mortar, techniques and technologies form part of the story of a hospital, but hospitals are ‘people’ places. Patients and parents, nurses and doctors, administrators and planners and cooks and cleaners gave the Mater Children’s Hospital its own unique ‘personality’, moulded by the philosophy and values of the Sisters of Mercy.

This history

a companion to Expressions of Mercy, Helen Gregory’s centenary history of Brisbane’s Mater hospitals

tells the story of the Mater Children’s Hospital against the background of rapidly growing, ethnically diverse populations in South East Queensland, developments in paediatrics and changes in governmental health policies.