Cincinnati Children's is home to a large neonatology department that oversees newborn nurseries at local hospitals around Ohio.

[12] The original articles of incorporation included the following statement: "This corporation is not created for profit, but will rely for its establishment and support on the voluntary gifts and contribution of the charitable and humane, and therefore is to have no capital stock."

The hospital opened in March 1884 in a rented home in Walnut Hills, a community north of downtown Cincinnati, at the corners of Park Avenue and Kemper Street (now Yale).

[13] The only patients eligible for admission were aged 1–15, suffering from an acute or chronic disease (or convalescent from such), required medical or surgical treatment.

The addition cost over $20,000 at the time, and included provisions for a large play-room, a chapel and an isolation ward for children with contagious diseases.

[13][14] The 1920s brought dramatic changes while under the leadership of William Cooper Procter, president of the board of trustees, and Albert Graeme Mitchell, MD, chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and physician-in-chief of The Children's Hospital.

[15][13][16] The hospital has been involved in a variety of medical breakthroughs, most prominently Dr. Albert Sabin's development of the oral polio vaccine, which went into use in the United States in 1960.