Editorial Note on Paediatrics

Keywords

Pediatrics psychiatry, Children’s practice.

Editorial

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 12^th century. The specialized focus of pediatrics did not begin to emerge in Europe until the 18^th 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 19^th 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 17^th century. Clinical studies of childhood diseases proliferated throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries, culminating in one of the first modern textbooks of pediatrics, published by Frédéric Rilliet and Antoine Barthez in France in 1838–1843, but there was little that could be done to cure these diseases until the end of the 19^th 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 20^th century the first well-child clinics were established to monitor and study the normal growth and development of children. By the mid-20^th 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.

The term psychiatry is gotten from the Greek words mind, signifying "brain" or "soul," and iatreia, signifying "mending." Until the eighteenth century, psychological instability was regularly seen as satanic belonging; however it steadily came to be considered as a disorder requiring treatment. Many adjudicators that cutting edge psychiatry was brought into the world with the endeavors of French doctor Philippe Pinel in the last part of the 1700s. His contemporary in the United States, legislator and doctor Benjamin Rush, presented a similar methodology. Maybe the main commitments to the field happened in the late nineteenth century, when German specialist Emil Kraepelin stressed a precise way to deal with mental conclusion and grouping and Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who knew about neuropathology, created analysis as a treatment and exploration approach.