Elizabeth McMaster

Elizabeth McMaster (December 27, 1847 – March 3, 1903) was a Canadian humanitarian and head of the committee which founded the Hospital for Sick Children.

Elizabeth Jennet Wyllie was born in Toronto in 1847, the second daughter of Mary Ann Reid and George Black Wyllie. She married Samuel Fenton McMaster who was a nephew of William McMaster, a Senator and the namesake of McMaster University in 1865. In the first decade of her marriage she devoted her time to raising children and philanthropic works for the poor. After that ten years, she began to work more intensely with medical aid for the sick and poor.

In her forties and after her husband's death in 1888, she trained to become a nurse in Chicago at Illinois Training School for Nurses (program merged in 1926 into the University of Chicago's School of Nursing and ceased to exist in 1929). Graduating in 1891 McMaster left Chicago to work at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles and Children's Home, an orphanage in Schenectady, New York. She later returned to Chicago, where she died in 1903.

The Great Ormond Street Hospital was the influence for her to establish the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.