It began 120 years ago as a ramshackle women’s hospital caring for one abandoned little girl. The “Hospital of the Little People,” as Kansas City’s Children’s Mercy was known then, took on a couple more young patients, then a dozen more, and eventually hundreds of victims of birth defects, accidents, illness, and abuse.

In a discussion of his book For All Children Everywhere, a comprehensive history of Children’s Mercy, Thomas McCormally walks through the renowned hospital’s founding by two sisters and its growth through more than a century of challenges – sexism, racism, the Great Depression, the Baby Boom, the Missouri-Kansas border war and the changing face of modern medicine and pediatrics.

McCormally, a former suburban Kansas City newspaper reporter, editor, and columnist, is the Children’s Mercy director of archives.