Articles of Incorporation

In 1883 women from Cincinnati’s Episcopal diocese approached the Bishop for their region, Thomas Jaggar, with a request. These women – at least those we know of who haven’t been lost to history (as women often are) - were Mrs. Robert Dayton, Isabelle Hopkins, and Isabelle’s sister, Mary Emery.

The women had seen, first-hand, the inadequate health care Cincinnati’s children were receiving at that time, particularly in Cincinnati’s adult hospitals. And they wanted action. 

They appealed to Bishop Jaggar for support in creating a children’s hospital. The Bishop agreed, and after months of planning, on November 10, 1883, seven men (and none of the women who initiated this effort) signed articles of incorporation for what would become The Hospital of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese of Southern Ohio.

In the incorporation papers five goals were outlined for the new hospital:

1. To provide medical and surgical aid and nursing for sick, infirm, and disabled children, either in the wards of the Hospital or at their homes
2. To provide (in a department distinct from that devoted to children), so soon as the funds of the corporation shall warrant, medical and surgical aid and nursing for sick and disabled adults, either in the wards of the Hospital or in their homes.
3. To provide the instruction and consolations of religion, according to the principles and usages of the Protestant Episcopal Church, for those who are under the care of the institution.
4. To instruct and train suitable persons in the duties of nursing and attending upon the sick.
5. To carry into execution such other purposes and objects, incidental and kindred to those above set out, as the Trustees of the corporation may from time to time prescribe.

Four days later, November 14, the Secretary of State of Ohio certified the articles of incorporation and the hospital became an official entity.

Jaggar was named President of the hospital’s Board of Trustees and a Board of Lady Managers was appointed to oversee its day-to-day operations. In March 1884 The Hospital of the Protestant Episcopal Church officially opened in a rented, and still standing, three-bedroom house on the corner of Park and Kemper Streets (now Yale) in the Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati.

With four volunteer doctors, a nurse, and a housemother, together with volunteers who assisted in caring for the patients, the hospital served 38 children in its first year.