The Gale Encyclopedia of Children's Health: Infancy through Adolescence

In the early history of medicine remarkably little notice seems to have been taken of children as such. There was a keen interest in problems of conception and the disorders of pregnancy and childbirth, but after that the pre‐nineteenth century approach seems to have been to assume that you had lots and lots of them, many of them died in the first few years and, if you were lucky, a few struggled through as best they could, being treated medically simply as miniature adults. Awareness of the psychological and medical problems of children as distinct from adults seems to have...