Babies Hospital: North Carolina's First Pediatric Care
Near Wilmington, North Carolina
In nineteen twenty, a Wilmington physician named J. Buren Sidbury opened a small hospital near the sound at Wrightsville Beach and named it simply the Babies Hospital. It was devoted to the care of babies and children.
Sidbury believed that coastal breezes aided recovery, and he believed even more firmly that infants and children deserved specialized medicine at a time when most doctors treated patients of all ages without distinction. He introduced new methods of infant feeding, pushed immunization, and trained the public and fellow physicians alike in what we now take for granted as modern pediatrics. A fire destroyed the original building in nineteen twenty-seven, but a new building was completed the next year.
A nurses' training school opened there in nineteen forty-two. His legacy lives in the J. Buren Sidbury Chair of Pediatrics at Duke University, endowed in his honor in nineteen sixty-five.
