‘A 2-Year-Old Goes to Hospital’: A 50th Anniversary Reappraisal of the Impact of James Robertson‘s Film

Abstract

James Robertson’s film, ‘A 2-year-old Goes to Hospital’, premiered in November 1952, is seen as a seminal influence on the development of hospital care for children. Its importance is amplified by a belief that Robertson’s work represented a wholly new perspective on such care, challenging an orthodoxy that had remained unchanged over the previous 100 years and that completely excluded parents from hospital wards. In this article I support the importance of Robertson’s film, but challenge the belief that its content was a radical departure from contemporary thinking. I argue instead that the film’s importance lies in the way that it communicated ideas to professionals and parents, and discuss the development of changes in thinking about the care of hospitalized children that had begun some years before ‘A 2-year-old Goes to Hospital’ was released.