History, says David Wencer, “is not just something that’s 100 years old.”

As the SickKids archivist and historian enthusiastically tots up milestones from the hospital’s 140 years, he throws in what could be called inch-markers — less significant, but fascinating innovations, some relatively recent.

For instance, the mysterious Gladiator-brand “anti-shock pants . . . . They just came in. I can’t wait to find out what they are.”

Then there’s Nobel laureate Frederick Banting’s 1919 job-application letter.

“We recently found that,” Wencer says. “There’s almost no information in it, just his name and military service in World War I.”

Banting’s work as co-discoverer of insulin is, Wencer continues, “claimed rightfully by the U. of T. But he was on staff here.”

The invention of Pablum in 1930 by three doctors at the hospital is part of SickKids folklore — the world’s first vitamin-enriched instant baby cereal, “easy, versatile, you could mix it with things,” he says. “Royalties from Pablum funded research here for years, so it’s not what Pablum is, but what its role was at SickKids.”

Less well-known is that, in 1909, politician and philanthropist John Ross Robertson bankrolled the city’s first milk-pasteurization plant for SickKids, 30 years before it became mandatory.

During the 1937 polio epidemic, the hospital desperately needed “iron-lung” respirators to enable young patients to keep breathing. Meanwhile, a makeshift wooden one was hurriedly cobbled together.

In the picture Wencer produces, it looks uncomfortably like a coffin. But the patient, named Gordon, reportedly survived. His head emerges from what Wencer says was a porthole donated by a shipbuilder.

“They’d go to local companies: ‘We don’t need money, we need parts that we can use.’ ”

As iron lungs were produced, the wooden one was sent to a hospital in Denver, he says. “I’d love to know if it survived and where it might be now.”

He produces a handful of little glass balls, “not unique to SickKids, but this blows my mind. They were hand-blown by a researcher here, Dr. Harry Schachter, which to my mind is kind of weird. He’s still on staff. But this is what research was like. If you couldn’t get little doohickeys like stoppers for test-tubes, you made your own.”

There’s a handbook with them, too: Laboratory Glass-Working for Scientists.

And here’s the box that held the first penicillin at SickKids, sent by Dr. Alexander Fleming, who discovered it, to Dr. Nelles Silverthorne in 1938. Silverthorne was the first dentist of record at the hospital, says Wencer: “He ran the first free dental clinic in North America.”

Other milestones include:

Dr. William Mustard’s training of more than 60 cardiac surgeons who now work in hospitals around the world. Mustard, who died in 1987, co-edited the Textbook of Pediatric Surgery.

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Geneticist Lap-Chee Tsui, in 1989, led the way in isolating the gene that causes cystic fibrosis, the most common fatal genetic disease affecting children born in Canada.

Housed in what looks almost like the rectangular case for an electric guitar and marked “R.B. Salter M.D.” is an early “continuous passive motion” machine developed by Robert Salter to treat joint injuries. Conventional wisdom was to keep the patient’s limb immobilized, but this device provides for movement, to aid healing.

Wencer produces a barbaric looking mask, an array of straps and metal strips that could almost be a dog muzzle. It was a temporary measure — “not as bad as it looks” — to prevent a child with a taste for lead paint from putting toys painted with it in his mouth.

And a colouring book, Billy Goes to Hospital, probably from the late ’50s that, Wencer says, “seems to have been made in-house. The Women’s Auxiliary has the copyright.”

Each of the sometimes disturbing illustrations, of a small boy’s stay in hospitals, is accompanied by an excruciatingly bad little verse. Not something you’d give a 21st-century sick kid, that’s for sure.

And finally, an explanation for those “anti-shock pants,” which were used until the 1980s. They were meant to help with blood flow to the heart following cardiac surgery. The inflatable garment is in one box and the equipment to blow it up in another.

So now we know.