Children's Mercy Hospital (Kansas City, Mo.)
Dates
- Existence: 1897
Biography
The founding of Children's Mercy Kansas City is traced to 1897 and two sisters, Dr. Alice Berry Graham, a dentist, and Dr. Katharine Berry Richardson, a physician.
As the story goes, a saloonkeeper in the Kansas City Stockyards had heard of the sisters' reputation for helping poor, sick children; and he told Dr. Graham of a woman he had seen in the streets trying to give away her crippled 5-year-old daughter.
Drs. Graham and Richardson found the girl abandoned, undernourished and poorly clothed. They arranged a bed for her at a small hospital on 15th and Cleveland in downtown Kansas City on June 24, 1897. The doctors established the Free Bed Fund Association and through painstaking care, they restored life to the orphaned child's crippled legs. With surgery and therapy, she walked again.
Their act of compassion and medical expertise was the beginning of what has become one of the leading children's hospitals in the world: Children's Mercy Kansas City.
Today, Children's Mercy includes two hospitals: a state-of-the-art hospital located at 2401 Gillham Rd. in Kansas City, Missouri, licensed for 301 beds, and 14 short-stay beds; and Children's Mercy Hospital Kansas, a 53-bed hospital in suburban Overland Park, Kansas. In addition, there are bustling outpatient clinics and urgent care centers throughout the metropolitan areas and many other communities in Missouri and Kansas.
Source: Children’s Mercy Hospital’s website
