pediatrics, medical specialty dealing with the development and care of children and with the
diagnosis and treatment of childhood diseases. The first important review of childhood
illness, an anonymous European work called The Children’s Practice, dates from the 12th
century. The specialized focus of pediatrics did not begin to emerge in Europe until the 18th
century. The first specialized children’s hospitals, such as the London Foundling Hospital,
established in 1745, were opened at this time. These hospitals later became major centres
for training in pediatrics, which began to be taught as a separate discipline in medical
schools by the middle of the 19th century.
The major focus of early pediatrics was the treatment of infectious diseases that affected
children. Thomas Sydenham in Britain had led the way with the first accurate descriptions of
measles, scarlet fever, and other diseases in the 17th century. Clinical studies of childhood
diseases proliferated throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, culminating in one of the first
modern textbooks of pediatrics, published by Frédéric Rilliet and Antoine Barthez in France
in 1838–43, but there was little that could be done to cure these diseases until the end of
the 19th century. As childhood diseases came under control through the combined efforts of
pediatricians, immunologists, and public-health workers, the focus of pediatrics began to
change, and early in the 20th century the first well-child clinics were established to monitor
and study the normal growth and development of children. By the mid-20th century, the use
of antibiotics and vaccines had all but eliminated most serious infectious diseases of
childhood in the developed world, and infant and child mortality had fallen to the lowest
levels ever. In the last half of the century, pediatrics again expanded to incorporate the study
of behavioral and social as well as specifically medical aspects of child health.
child development, the growth of perceptual, emotional, intellectual, and behavioral
capabilities and functioning during childhood. The term childhood denotes that period in the
human lifespan from the acquisition of language at one or two years to the onset
of adolescence at 12 or 13 years.
A brief treatment of child development follows. For full treatment, see human behaviour:
Theories of development. The physical growth of children is treated in human development.
The end of infancy and the onset of childhood are marked by the emergence of speech at
one to two years of age. Children make enormous progress in language acquisition in their
second year and demonstrate a continually growing vocabulary, an increasing use of words
in combinations, and a dawning understanding of the rules of grammar and syntax. By their
third year children tend to use sentences containing five or even six words, and by the fourth
year they can converse in adultlike sentences. Five- and six-year-olds demonstrate a mastery
of complex rules of grammar and meaning.
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Characteristics of the Human Body
Early childhood (two to seven years) is also the time in which children learn to use symbolic
thought and language to manipulate their environment. They learn to perform various
mental operations using symbols, concepts, and ideas to transform information they gather
about the world around them. The beginnings of logic, involving the classification of ideas
and an understanding of time and number, emerge in later childhood (7 to 12 years).
Children’s memory capacity also advances continually during childhood and underpins many
other cognitive advances they make at that time. As both short-term and long-term memory
improve, children demonstrate an increasing speed of recall and can search their memory
for information more quickly and efficiently.
Young children’s growing awareness of their own emotional states, characteristics, and
abilities leads to empathy—i.e., the ability to appreciate the feelings and perspectives of
others. Empathy and other forms of social awareness are in turn important in
the development of a moral sense. The basis of morality in children may be said to progress
from a simple fear of punishment and pain to a concern for maintaining the approval of
one’s parents. Another important aspect of children’s emotional development is the
formation of their self-concept, or identity—i.e., their sense of who they are and what their
relation to other people is. Sex-role identity, based on gender, is probably the most
important category of self-awareness and usually appears by the age of three.
The onset of the physical and emotional changes of puberty and the acquisition of the
logical processes of adults mark the end of childhood and the start of adolescence.
