Pediatrics
Pediatrics are basically the care of children, it is as old as our species, but the discipline of pediatrics emerged barely a century ago. In this progression, the history the field of pediatrics follows the general pattern of the history of medicine: the timeless traditions of informal health care in the home, the roots of modern medicine in ancient Rome, the gradual emergence of science in the 1600s. The provision of health care by medical professionals working in ever larger institutions during the 1800s, and the recent faith that technically sophisticated our medicine will cure disease and improve health. What distinguishes pediatrics from other branches of medicine is the notion that children are our future, and consequently that their health and well being are a matter of broad social concern. Since antiquity, political and medical leaders have argued that healthy children are necessary to the well-being of the state. Each nation state's response to such arguments has affected both the health of children and how societies have organized pediatric health services.
Women and pediatrics
Women have long had an important role in the field of pediatrics, especially in the United States. Many without medical training, such as Julia Lathrop (1858–1932), the first director of the U.S. Children's Bureau, held leadership positions in government and philanthropic organizations designed to improve the health and well-being of children. Within the field of medicine, women physicians accounted for 20 percent of practitioners in some U.S. cities in the early 1900s. They directed hospitals, medical schools, and city health departments. Because many women felt a special obligation to provide medical care to women and children, they often specialized in obstetrics and pediatrics; many took academic positions and some gained national prominence in pediatrics. Following the reforms in medical education in the early 1900s, the number of women physicians fell to approximately 5 percent of all doctors. As their numbers have increased since 1970, however, women have again moved toward pediatrics as a field of specialization. In the year 2000 approximately half of all pediatricians in the United States were women, and they represent about two-thirds of pediatricians-in-training.
Vaccination
The most famous therapeutic intervention of the 1700s was a theoretical anomaly. Inoculation against smallpox had been practiced in India and parts of the Arab world for centuries, but it never fit the model of disease and cure implied by the balance of body humors. Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) brought the practice to the West when she had her son inoculated with material from a smallpox victim in 1718 in Constantinople. She championed the idea of inoculation before physicians and royalty as a way to lessen the burden of smallpox; nearly every child contracted signs and symptoms of the disease and many were permanently scarred by the skin lesions. Some estimated that as many as 30 percent of all children died from smallpox. In the 1790s, Edward Jenner (1749–1823) noted that young women who milked cows and became infected with cowpox did not get smallpox.
child health problems
Viewed as a medical discipline, pediatrics has shifted in response to each generation's understanding of which diseases seemed most important among children. While Hippocrates focused on climate and special vulnerable periods for children, later scientists wrote about the most common infectious diseases, from smallpox in the 1700s to diarrhea in the late 1800s. The dramatic decrease in infectious diseases in developed nations over the last century has led pediatricians to focus on rare chronic illnesses and behavioral and developmental conditions. The mapping of the human genome promises new ways to eliminate disabilities and prevent chronic illness in the twenty first century.