Each time new details about the royal baby came out last week, the Internet went abuzz. Whether it was when Catherine, duchess of Cambridge, went into labor or when the beaming Prince William and Catherine showed off their newborn baby boy for the first time, the world watched on with delight.
The royal baby received much more attention than the 10,000 infants born every year at the Magee-Womens Hospital of UPMC on Halket Street in Oakland. Although the facility has expanded its services in the last decade to men seeking treatment or surgeries, it was known throughout most of its history as a hospital for women and their babies.
In 1911, Mrs. Alfred Birdsall was transported in a horse-drawn ambulance and delivered the first baby in a makeshift hospital that would one day be known as Magee. The hospital was named after state Sen. Christopher Magee’s mother, Elizabeth. In the senator’s will, he dictated that it “be open to the sick and injured of all classes without respect to their religion, creed, color, or previous condition… “
The permanent building, capable of accommodating 140 adults and eight infants, opened Oct. 15, 1915. Today, the state-of-the-art facility boasts 380 beds and 2,500 employees. In fact, about two thirds of all babies delivered in Allegheny County are born at Magee.
During its more than 100 years of existence, Magee has always been known as a leader in saving the lives of the critically ill newborns. That tradition continues today, with the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Magee treating more than 1,500 seriously or critically ill babies each year.
According to an article in The Pittsburgh Press dated Oct. 5, 1969, a section of the nursery was an intensive care unit for high-risk babies, making sure those infants receive constant attention. Nurses stationed there would receive requests seven or eight times per week from other hospitals, some from as far away as West Virginia. Those babies were under 24-hour watch from a team of nurses and doctors once transported to Magee. Much of the group’s efforts were assisted by fundraising from the Twenty-Five Club, a program founded in 1939 to support infant research. “We also have equipment, which is available nowhere else in the area. Every possibly care is given to these babies, and we usually pull them through,” Mrs. Margaret Van Dyke, the coordinator of the premature nursery, told The Pittsburgh Press.
Mrs. Van Dyke was herself a mother of a girl who was born prematurely and treated at Magee. She considered herself lucky that her daughter was not born with complications, according to an article in The Pittsburgh Press dated Oct. 18, 1970. When her daughter was born in 1951, the advanced equipment was not available to help premature babies and the hospital isolated mothers from their premature babies for extensive periods of time. “Our whole concept has changed,” Mrs. Van Dyke said. “We now emphasize the parent-child relationship with [premature babies]. We realize how important it is that mothers and fathers have some physical contact with their babies.”
Although technology has advanced over the years, in turn changing the treatment infants receive at Magee, the care exhibited by the nurses has remained a trademark of Magee throughout the hospital’s long history.