The Manchester Clinical Hospital for the Diseases of Children (later Manchester Northern Hospital) was founded in Stevenson Square, Manchester, in 1856 by a Hungarian immigrant, August Schoepf Merei, and his Manchester colleague, James Whitehead. The Clinical Hospital was founded using other Continental children’s hospitals as a model, but Merei and Whitehead also incorporated their own principles into the management of what was their private experiment. Their detailed observations and research into children’s growth, development and nutrition was unusual in England, where child welfare did not become a public concern until nearer to the end of the nineteenth century, although similar researches were underway in many European countries at that time. Many of these observations were published in the first two annual reports of the hospital but August Schoepf Merei died before the findings were discussed in more detail and published elsewhere and research at the hospital effectively ceased until the early twentieth century and physicians became interested in child health and development in England.