500 PEDIATRICS 



M. Andry, L'orthopedie ou I'art de prevenir et corriger dans les 

 enfants les difformites du corps, 1741; Nils Rosen de Rosenstein, 

 1752; E. Armstrong, An Essay on Diseases most Fatal to Infants, 

 1768; and M. Underwood, Treatise on the Diseases of Children, 1784; 

 also Hufeland, established pediatrics as a clinical entity; while 

 Edward Jenner, 1798, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the 

 Variolae Vaccinae, opened the possibilities of a radical prevention of 

 infectious and contagious diseases, the very subject which, a century 

 later, is engaging the best minds and a host of assiduous workers in 

 the service of plague-stricken mankind. 



In the United States pediatrics was taught in medical schools, or 

 was expected to be taught, by the professors of obstetrics and the 

 diseases of women and children. The reorganization of the New York 

 Medical College in East Thirteenth Street facilitated the creation, in 

 1860, of a special clinic for the diseases of the young. Instead of the 

 united gynecologic and obstetric clinics held by Bedford, Oilman, 

 and G. T. Elliott in their respective medical colleges, there was a single 

 clinic for the diseases of the young exclusively. When the Civil War 

 caused the College to close its doors forever, in 1864, the clinic was 

 transferred to the University Medical College, and in 1870 to the Col- 

 lege of Physicians and Surgeons. Meanwhile other medical schools 

 imitated the example thus presented. The teachers were classed 

 amongst the " clinical " professors; only in those schools which are 

 forming part of universities and are no longer proprietary establish- 

 ments, a few now occupy the honored position of full professors; in a 

 very few the professor of pediatrics is a full member of the "faculty." 



In the English Colonies of America the earliest treatise on a medi- 

 cal, in part pediatric subject was a broadside, 12 inches by 17. It 

 was written by the Rev. Thomas Thacher, and bears the date Jan- 

 uary 21, 1677-8. It was printed and sold by John Foster of Boston. 

 The title is "a brief rule to guide the common people of New Eng- 

 land how to order themselves and theirs in the Small-Pocks, or 

 measles." A second edition was printed in 1702. 



Before and about the same time in which American pediatrics 

 received its first recognition at the hands of the New York Medical 

 College, European literature furnished a new and brilliant special 

 literature. France which almost exclusively held up the flag of 

 scientific medicine during the first forty years of the eighteenth 

 century, furnished in C. Billard's Traite" des maladies des enfants 

 nouveau-nes, 1828, and in Rilliet's and Barthez's Traite clinique et 

 pratique des maladies des enfants, 1838-43, standard works which were 

 examples of painstaking research and fertile observation. England, 

 which produced in 1801 I. Cheyne's Essays on the Diseases of Chil- 

 dren, gave birth to Charles West's classical lectures on the diseases 

 of infants and children in 1848, and F. Churchill's treatise in 1850. 



