The University of Virginia Children's Hospital
A network of pediatric health care facilities operating under the umbrella of the University of Virginia Health System, the University's Children's Hospital is a "hospital without walls," dedicated to providing comprehensive inpatient and outpatient care for infants, children, and adolescents in a family-centered environment.
The Children's Hospital consists of eight key components:
- General Wards - 37 beds on two wards: one for infants, another for older children and adolescents
- Newborn Intensive Care Unit - a state-of-the-art facility with 31 beds served by a hospital-based, ground and air neonatal transport system
- Newborn and Transitional Nurseries - a 20 bed Newborn Nursery as well as a Transitional Nursery with eight beds
- Pediatric Intensive Care Unit - a 14 bed, high acuity unit with 700 to 800 annual admissions, of whom about three out of five have primarily medical issues and about two out of five have primarily surgical problems
- General Pediatric and Continuity Clinics - clinics providing health promotion/disease prevention, management of chronic and acute conditions, etc.
- Sub-specialty Clinics - a variety of clinics treating patients in pediatric subspecialties. (types of sub-specialty clinics)
- Kluge Children's Rehabilitation Center - a regional facility focusing on interdisciplinary diagnosis and treatment; both inpatient (500-600 annual admissions) and outpatient (10,000 visits each year to its twenty-two clinics)
- Satellite General Pediatric Offices - two general pediatric clinics (Northridge and Orange), each within a few minutes of the University, that together serve about 24,000 patients annually
Last year, there were more than 6000 admissions to the inpatient units of the Children's Hospital and more than 60,000 outpatient visits to our ambulatory clinics, with patients coming from Virginia and beyond. Inpatient and outpatient visits range from the simplest newborn check-up to complex medical procedures like liver, lung, or heart transplants and complex neurosurgery.
The University's First Pediatrician
The Children's Hospital and the Health System are both part of the University of Virginia, a state-funded university nurtured by Thomas Jefferson as the "hobby of my old age," as he put it. Answering Jefferson's call, twenty-six-year-old Robley Dunglison, a specialist in obstetrics and pediatrics, left his home in England to become the University's first professor of anatomy when the "academical village" first began receiving students in 1825.
Even at this young age, Dunglison was already a well-known writer. The last work he wrote before leaving England was Commentaries on the Diseases of the Stomach and Bowels of Children, intended "as a commencement of a treatise or series of treatises on the diseases of children," and which advocated several heroic measures. But Dunglison also expressed that quality incumbent on all good physicians: humility. In the preface he wrote: "at a future period, it is the intention of the author to resume the consideration of some other of those diseases, which are incident to children: not under the arrogant expectation of being able to communicate much important information from his own stores, but in accordance with the motto at the head of these prefatory observations: Facem exiguam accendere, qua alii egregiis animi dotibus ornati opus imperfectum limato suo ingenio perpoliant." In other words, "Kindle a slender flame by which others blessed with eminent qualities of mind may brighten an imperfect work with their own elegant talent."
In addition to serving as Thomas Jefferson's personal physician, Dunglison translated and edited a number of European medical texts. In 1832, he published his Human Physiology, a volume described by The American Journal of Medical Sciences as "the most complete and satisfactory system of Physiology in the English language." Over the next twenty-six years it went through eight editions, and justly helped to solidify his reputation as the "Father of American Physiology."
For more about the University's first pediatrician, see the biography of Robley Dunglison at the UVa Health System's website.