This history of the evolution of pediatrics from the beginning of recorded civilization examines chronologically the medical and societal antecedents of current child care. Although the term pediatrics is modern, the book explores the antecedents that facilitated the evolution of pediatric care as a separate discipline and a unique science. These antecedents include ancient manuscripts and the writings of acknowledged medical classicists, and the works of physicians in the East who recorded the medicine of the ancients, their own original theories, clinical observations, and experience, and exported their wisdom to the West.

The book's point of view demonstrates that healers from the beginning of recorded time understood the unique physiology of the infant and the distinct nutritional and medical needs of the growing child. Despite this recognition, centuries of poorly applied medical principles prevailed in the general population as adjuncts to societal conditions that included war, pestilence, ignorance of the pathophysiology of disease, and the exploitation of labor. In this milieu, suffering was universal. Pediatrics came into its own when richer, more stable societies had the time, energy, and resources to provide for the most vulnerable of their subjects. Motives included economic self-interest as well as altruistic demand for social reform.

"A History of Children" investigates the treatment of children throughout the millennia, examining and comparing, in the timeline from prehistory to the present, cultural codes, and societal laws. A recurrent theme in the book is the unchanging, immutable nature of childhood despite epochal and societal differences in birth rituals, education, puberty rituals, inheritance laws, child labor legislation, cultural customs, and historical events that have affected the lives of children over the last 5000 years. Despite the cruelties of infanticide, abandonment, and slavery that continue to have a presence in the modern world, the love and regard for children have not changed drastically. The authors reveal the impact of laws, religions, pedagogues, medicine, advocates, and the rogues of history--plagues, tyrants, wars, superstitions, poverty and famines--on the lives of children. They paint a composite portrait of the child within the broad swatches of early civilizations, the Classical and Patristic periods, the medieval and Renaissance epochs, the Reformation, Revolutionary periods, and the past century--all with the intent to inform the reader of the past and to prepare for the future.