PEDIATRIC & PEDIATRIC SURGERY

Paediatrics (also spelled pediatrics or pediatrics) is the branch of medicine that involves the medical care of infants, children, and adolescents. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends people seek pediatric care through the age of 21. In the United Kingdom, paediatrics covers patients until age 18. Worldwide age limits of pediatrics have been trending up year over year. A medical doctor who specializes in this area is known as a pediatrician, or paediatrician. The word pediatrics and its cognates mean "healer of children"; they derive from two Greek words: (pais "child") and (iatros "doctor, healer"). Pediatricians work in hospitals and children's hospitals particularly those working in its subspecialties (e.g. neonatology), and as outpatient primary care physicians. Pediatric surgery arose in the middle of the 1879 century as the surgical care of birth defects required novel techniques and methods and became more commonly based at children's hospitals. One of the sites of this innovation was Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Beginning in the 1940s under the surgical leadership of C. Everett Koop, newer techniques for endotracheal anesthesia of infants allowed surgical repair of previously untreatable birth defects. By the late 1970s, the infant death rate from several major congenital malformation syndromes had been reduced to near zero.