This is especially so regarding pediatric aspects of sleep and its disorders. Health education for parents and prospective parents often pays little regard to sleep. With some commendable exceptions, medical students, and specialist trainees, including pediatricians and child psychiatrists, health visitors, child psychologists, and teachers, receive little relevant instruction despite the fact that they all come into contact with many young people whose sleep is disturbed, sometimes with serious Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical consequences. This relative neglect of children is interesting

historically. To some degree it can be seen to reflect the very gradual and sporadic Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical emergence of pediatrics in general as a branch of medicine in its own right. At times (and in some respects still), children have been thought of as little adults. The extent to which this has been the case has been hotly debated by historians. On various grounds, Selleck Belinostat Aries1 argued that for many centuries childhood was not acknowledged as a distinct period of development. This view was considered by some to Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical have lingered on in some respects until as late as the 19th century; witness child labor and sometimes the use of severe punishment of the type meted out to adults. Others have vigorously contested

Aries’ claim, pointing out the various ways in which, from early times, children have been recognized by parents and both secular and Church law, for example, as being very different from adults.2 Despite this counterclaim, it is interesting to trace the slow

and (at least initially) Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical faltering development of pediatrics as a specialty, the classic account of which remains Still’s The History of Paediatrics, first published in 1931.3 Hippocrates was probably the first eminent writer to pay special attention to children’s diseases, followed, some hundreds of years later, by Soranus Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and Galen and then, much later again, Rhazes and mafosfamide Avicenna. Still describes the gathering (although sporadic) momentum in more recent centuries, often in relation to descriptions of individual pediatric conditions, but eventually leading to more systematic and comprehensive clinical accounts and provision of pediatric services in the 19th and 20th centuries. Along the way, a particularly notable figure, for whom Still seems to have had a special regard, was Thomas Phaire, a lawyer and physician, who in 1545 published The Bote of Chyldren, the first pediatrics textbook written by an Englishman.4 The book proved very popular, and ran to several editions. It deserves special mention for many reasons, not least because it discusses children’s sleep problems and disorders.