Excerpt from The Diseases of Children and Their Homeopathic Treatment: A Text-Book for Students, Colleges, and Practitioners The period of infancy, when used in a medical sense, is understood as covering the time from birth to the completion Of first dentition, which occurs as a rule when the child is about two and a half years of age. Childhood covers the period from infancy to puberty, which in this country is reached at an age Of twelve to fourteen. When taken together they constitute an epoch in human life which is fraught with absorbing interest. Until within the last thirty years no American medical college had paid any special attention to the diseases peculiar to childhood; no children's clinics were held, and all that the medical student could learn about them was to be found in the text-books and didactic lectures on general practice. Now, however, all Of our princi pal medical colleges have a special chair of pedology; special children's clinics are deemed as necessary as any other, and numerous large and comprehensive treatises devoted to this subject are among the most highly prized volumes in every intelligent physician's medical library. It is not at all strange that this should be so. The period referred to is essentially different in every aspect from adult life. The anatomy, the physiology, the pathology and the therapeutics Of infancy are all sufficiently different to require special study and special knowledge for their proper under standing. That adults occasionally and exceptionally have diseases that as a rule are found only among children, does not militate against this statement. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.