Robert Debré building

1802 was the year of the creation of the Hospital for Sick Children in Paris, the first hospital in Europe exclusively dedicated to children, who at the time, had to put up with the promiscuity of adults.

In Rouen, in the 19th century, children were primarily treated at home. When they had to be hospitalized, they were accommodated in large common rooms in Charles Nicolle hospital. Mortality was extremely high there until the construction of isolation wards for contagious diseases.

In 1932, at Bois-Guillaume hospital (former Join Lambert institution acquired in 1921), a pavilion was built under the direction of Doctor Martin, director of the Pasteur Institute, to accommodate 300 children in the best conditions of hygiene and care, even offering them a puppet theatre in the park.

In 1962, the administration’s desire to concentrate all its highly technical activities on Charles Nicolle site, became a reality for paediatrics with the completion of a new pavilion, the first stone of which was laid on 31 October 1959 by Bernard Chenot, Minister of Health, in the presence of Bernard Tissot, Mayor of Rouen and Chairman of the Administrative Commission.

On April 8, 1962, a referendum approved the Evian agreements and signed the end of the "events" in Algeria. One million returnees were welcomed, 500,000 of whom were received during the summer. As the pavilion was not yet occupied, it housed some of these Frenchmen who were forced to come to France for their safety.

In the first days of March 1964, when the building had been returned to its original destination, all the children, nurses and staff of the children's hospital "went into town" with the help of private ambulances, the police and the army.

This building is now the oldest of the hospital's patient wards. Over the last forty years or so, it has made room for the birth and progress of paediatric specialties (resuscitation, extrarenal purification, onco-haematology and transplants, imaging...) as well as hospitalization conditions (children's home, hospital school, mother-child hospitalization, adolescent unit, surgery and outpatient medicine...). From the cellar to the attic, all surfaces are occupied. The building has been enlarged on the outside to make room for the specific reception of adolescents and the increase in the number of emergency rooms (110 children every day).

The Pediatrics Pavilion was renamed Robert Debré Pavilion. The CHU thus pays tribute to a great paediatrician, one of the founders of modern paediatrics in France, but also to the visionary man who promoted excellence in public hospital medicine by being at the origin of the creation of the University Hospital Centres (CHU) in 1958 in which the medical profession must ensure a triple mission: care, teaching, research.