Hendrika Bestebreurtje Cantwell

Hendrika Bestebreurtje Cantwell died on July 24, 2025 after 100 years of giving this life her all.

She was a pioneering pediatrician and educator who taught hundreds of professionals how to better protect vulnerable children as an expert in the prevention and treatment of child abuse. Dr. Cantwell worked for Denver Health and Hospitals starting in 1955, and beginning in 1975 served as the consulting physician for the city’s child protection agency. By her retirement in 1989, she had examined about 30,000 children alleged to have been abused or neglected. Her medical evaluations aided police and social services investigations, and she made hundreds of court appearances in juvenile as well as criminal courts. She helped judges and other legal professionals understand how to believe children as she helped set important court precedents.

Dr. Cantwell also launched systems to identify at-risk children and protect them from abuse and neglect. She helped develop a Family Crisis Center where children could be cared for in a sensitive way while professionals determined the best placement for those removed from unsafe environments. She helped parents as well. One of her early discoveries was that most child abuse was handed down through the generations. She created parenting classes and brought homemade soup to nurture and teach the parents. She understood they often needed understanding and compassion rather than merely being seen as abusers.

Dr. Cantwell’s responsibilities included clinical supervision and instruction. She served as Clinical Professor with the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and the C. Henry Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect. She wrote seminal articles about child neglect and child sexual abuse and contributed to numerous books as well as lecturing at conferences around the nation. The literature she authored helped establish legal and medical standards of child neglect and child sexual abuse. Those standards are widely in use today.

After retiring, Dr. Cantwell consulted for another seven years with the Colorado Department of Social Services, travelling to every corner of Colorado to teach myriad professionals about protecting children. She lectured about child protection at conferences across the nation.

She received many awards for her efforts, including the C. Henry Kempe Award in 1991, an annual Hendrika B. Cantwell Award created by the Colorado Bar Association, and “Physician of the Century’’ from the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners in 2015. She was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame in 1990.

But Dr. Cantwell’s life was full of much more than doctoring. Born a citizen of the Netherlands in 1925, she spent most of her childhood in Zurich, Switzerland. Her family escaped Nazi-occupied Europe in 1941 when she was 15 and immigrated to the U.S. She entered Barnard College the next year, still without a firm grasp of English, and graduated on time. She continued to Medical School at the University of Rochester.

On a trip to the Adirondack mountains of New York, she met William P. Cantwell, then a law student. She’d found someone who loved to ski as much as she did. They married in 1947, and they moved to Denver in 1952 to enjoy the beauty of the mountains, raise a family and pursue their careers. William Cantwell was a prominent attorney in Denver for 40 years as well as her beloved husband before his death in 2003.

She was a devoted mother to her three children, all of whom survive her: Peter (Kaye), Rebecca and Chris (Jan), and to her grandchildren William (Meagan), Luke, Anton, Amelia, Eric (Celeste), Logan (Corie) and Wesley (Soli), and to her great-grandchildren Addison and Camryn. Hendrika Cantwell was the last of her Dutch family in the U.S. for more than 30 years and served as a beloved aunt and great aunt to her extended family of nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews, helping them keep a connection to their European roots. She was emphatically connected to life and the many she loved, nurtured and served. She never wanted to miss a thing.

Hendrika Cantwell said that learning knitting in the Swiss public schools was one of her more treasured skills. She knit, crocheted, needlepointed and embroidered throughout her life, leaving an ouevre of beauty for her loved ones. She was famous for her soup, usually started with carefully saved chicken bones. She loved flowers and gardening, and in her later retirement was still growing most of her summer vegetables. She enjoyed cooking for family and friends well into her 90s.

Hendrika and William Cantwell taught their three children to ski, and then taught all their children to ski. She finally called it quits just before her 90th birthday. She enjoyed traveling and took cruises and land expeditions to destinations including South America, Africa, Australia and all over Europe. Even when she could no longer hike, she loved going to the Colorado mountains appreciating every wildflower and looking to identify every bird. She attended Colorado Symphony concerts and choral music until shortly before her death. And she was a voracious reader to the end, often finishing several books each month.

Contributions in her name are suggested to Denver Children’s Advocacy Center, Sierra Club or World Wildlife Fund.

Link to Denver Children's Advocacy Center: https://www.denvercac.org/donate/