Pediatrics - History

History

Pediatrics is a relatively new medical specialty. Hippocrates, Aristotle, Celsus, Soranus, and Galen, understood the differences in growing and maturing organisms that necessitated differnt treatment "Ex toto non sic pueri ut viri curari debent." A 2nd century AD manuscript by the Greek physician and gynecologist Soranus of Ephesus dealt with neonatal pediatrics. Byzantine physicians; Oribasius, Alexander Trallianus, and Paulus Aegineta stand out for their contributions to child care. The Byzintines also built brephotrophia, "baby shelters,"or "children's hospitals."Islamic writers served as a bridge for Greco-Roman and Byzantine medicine and added ideas of their own especially Haly Abbas, Serapion, Rhazes, Avicenna, and Averroes, The Persian scholar and doctor al-Razi (865–925) published a short treatise on diseases among children. The first printed book on pediatrics was in Italian (1472) – Bagallarder's Little Book on Disease in Children. Paulus Bagellardus a Flumine (d.1492) De Infantium Aegritudinibus et Remediis 1472, Bartolomaeus Metlinger (d.1491) Ein Regiment der Jungerkinder 1473, Cornelius Roelans (1450-1525) no title Buchlein, or Latin compendium, 1483, and Heinrich von Louffenburg (1391-1460) Versehung des Leibs written 1429 published 1491. together form the Pediatric Incunabula ,four great medical treatises on children's physiology and pathology. Pediatrics as a specialized field of medicine developed in the mid-19th century; Abraham Jacobi (1830–1919) is known as the father of pediatrics because of his many contributions to the field. He was born in Germany, where he received his medical training, but later practiced in New York City.

In the Western world, the first generally accepted pediatric hospital is the Hôpital des Enfants Malades (French: Hospital for Sick Children), which opened in Paris in June 1802 on the site of a previous orphanage. From its beginning, this famous hospital accepted patients up to the age of fifteen years, and it continues to this day as the pediatric division of the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital, created in 1920 by merger with the physically contiguous Necker Hospital, founded in 1778.

This example was only gradually followed in other European countries. The Charité (a hospital founded in 1710) in Berlin established a separate Pediatric Pavilion in 1830, followed by similar institutions at Saint Petersburg in 1834, and at Vienna and Breslau (now Wrocław), both in 1837. The English-speaking world waited until 1852 for its first pediatric hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, some fifty years after the founding of its namesake in Paris. In the USA, the first similar institutions were the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, which opened in 1855, and then Boston Children's Hospital (1869).