Shriner History Page 5

                                                                                                                First Hospital

   Before the June 1922 Session, the cornerstone was in place for the first Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children in Shreveport, La. The rules for this hospital, and all the other Shriners Hospitals which would follow, were simple: To be admitted, a child must be from a family unable to pay for the orthopaedic treatment he would receive (this is no longer a requirement), be under 14 years of age (later increased to 18) and be, in the opinion of the chief of staff, someone whose condition could be helped.

   The work of the great Shriners Hospitals network is supervised by the members of the Board of Trustees, who are elected at the annual meeting of the hospital corporation. Each hospital operates under the supervision of a local Board of Governors, a chief of staff and an administrator. Members of the boards are Shriners, who serve without pay.

   The network of orthopaedic hospitals grew as follows: Shreveport, Sept. 16, 1922; Honolulu, Jan. 2, 1923; Twin Cities, March 12, 1923; San Francisco, June 16, 1923 (relocated to Sacramento in 1997); Portland, Jan. 15, 1924; St. Louis, April 8, 1924; Spokane, Nov. 15, 1924; Salt Lake City, Jan. 22, 1925; Montreal, Feb. 18, 1925; Springfield, Feb. 21, 1925; Chicago, March 20, 1926; Philadelphia, June 24, 1926; Lexington, Nov. 1, 1926; Greenville, Sept. 1, 1927; Mexico City, March 10, 1945; Houston, Feb. 1, 1952; Los Angeles, Feb. 25, 1952; Winnipeg, March 16, 1952 (closed Aug. 12, 1977); Erie, April 1, 1967; Tampa, Oct. 16, 1985, and Sacramento, Calif., April 14, 1997. This newest Shriners Hospital is the only one in the Shrine system that provides orthopaedic, burn and spinal cord injury care, and conducts research, all in a single facility.

   The first patient to be admitted in 1922 was a little girl with a club foot from the red clay country south of Shreveport, La., who had learned to walk on the top of her foot rather than the sole. The first child to be admitted in Minneapolis was a Blackfoot Indian boy suffering from the deformities of polio. Since that time, more than 700,000 children have been treated at the 22 Shriners Hospitals. Surgical techniques developed in Shriners Hospitals have become standard in the orthopaedic world. Thousands of children have been fitted with arm and leg braces and artificial limbs, most of them made in special labs in the hospitals by expert technicians.