The Old Sick Kids: A Children's Hospital at Sciennes
Why is it significant?
In front of you stands a large late-Victorian hospital building, with tall windows, gables and carved stone details, looking out over the quiet streets of Sciennes.
Key Facts
| Place | The Old Sick Kids: A Children's Hospital at Sciennes |
|---|---|
| Address | Sciennes Road, Edinburgh EH9 1LF, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.93840, -3.18930 |
| Part of Walk | Surgeons, Skeletons and Dolly the Sheep: Edinburgh's Southside of Medicine and Science |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you stands a large late-Victorian hospital building, with tall windows, gables and carved stone details, looking out over the quiet streets of Sciennes. For well over a century every Edinburgh family knew it simply as the Sick Kids, and plenty of grown-ups walking past it still remember a ward, a nurse or a plaster cast from inside.
The hospital was founded in 1860, the first children's hospital in Scotland, in a modest house in Lauriston Lane. Before then, sick children of poor families were mostly nursed at home, or placed in adult wards where they caught every infection going. The founders believed that children were not simply small adults, and that they needed their own doctors, their own nurses and their own beds.
This building opened in 1895, designed by George Washington Browne, with the same faith in light and air you saw at the Royal Infirmary on Lauriston Place. Its most precious treasure was a cycle of murals by the artist Phoebe Anna Traquair, first painted in the 1880s for the mortuary chapel of the earlier hospital and then recreated here: angels and children, tender and luminous, painted for grieving parents by one of the great artists of the Scottish Arts and Crafts movement.
Children's medicine changed beyond recognition within these walls. Like the Royal Infirmary, it was paid for over many decades by public generosity, through donations, collections and bequests, until the National Health Service took it over in 1948. Vaccines, antibiotics and modern surgery turned diphtheria, scarlet fever and tuberculosis from common killers of children into rarities. In 2021 the hospital moved to a new building at Little France, beside the Royal Infirmary, closing a chapter of more than 125 years at Sciennes.
Fittingly, the last stop on this walk is about healing too... but not of people. Follow Sciennes Road east to its end, then turn left and walk north a few minutes to the rambling stone buildings of Summerhall.