The earliest mentions of child-specific medical problems appear in the Hippocratic Corpus, published in the fifth century B.C., and the famous Sacred Disease. These publications discussed topics such as childhood epilepsy and premature births. From the first to fourth centuries A.D., Greek philosophers and physicians Celsus, Soranus of Ephesus, Aretaeus, Galen, and Oribasius, also discussed specific illnesses affecting children in their works, such as rashes, epilepsy, and meningitis.^[5] Already Hippocrates, Aristotle, Celsus, Soranus, and Galen^[6] understood the differences in growing and maturing organisms that necessitated different treatment: Ex toto non sic pueri ut viri curari debent (“In general, boys should not be treated in the same way as men”).^[7] Some of the oldest traces of pediatrics can be discovered in Ancient India where children’s doctors were called kumara bhrtya.^[6]

Even though some pediatric works existed during this time, they were scarce and rarely published due to a lack of knowledge in pediatric medicine. Sushruta Samhita an ayurvedic text, composed during the sixth century BC contains the text about pediatrics.^[8] Another ayurvedic text from this period is Kashyapa Samhita.^[9][10] A second century AD manuscript by the Greek physician and gynecologist Soranus of Ephesus dealt with neonatal pediatrics.^[11] Byzantine physicians Oribasius, Aëtius of Amida, Alexander Trallianus, and Paulus Aegineta contributed to the field.^[6] The Byzantines also built brephotrophia (crêches).^[6] Islamic Golden Age writers served as a bridge for Greco-Roman and Byzantine medicine and added ideas of their own, especially Haly Abbas, Yahya Serapion, Abulcasis, Avicenna, and Averroes. The Persian philosopher and physician al-Razi (865–925), sometimes called the father of pediatrics, published a monograph on pediatrics titled Diseases in Children.^[12][13] Also among the first books about pediatrics was Libellus [Opusculum] de aegritudinibus et remediis infantium 1472 (“Little Book on Children Diseases and Treatment”), by the Italian pediatrician Paolo Bagellardo.^[14][5] In sequence came Bartholomäus Metlinger‘s Ein Regiment der Jungerkinder 1473, Cornelius Roelans (1450–1525) no title Buchlein, or Latin compendium, 1483, and Heinrich von Louffenburg (1391–1460) Versehung des Leibs written in 1429 (published 1491), together form the Pediatric Incunabula, four great medical treatises on children’s physiology and pathology.^[6]

While more information about childhood diseases became available, there was little evidence that children received the same kind of medical care that adults did.^[15] It was during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that medical experts started offering specialized care for children.^[5] The Swedish physician Nils Rosén von Rosenstein (1706–1773) is considered to be the founder of modern pediatrics as a medical specialty,^[16][17] while his work The diseases of children, and their remedies (1764) is considered to be “the first modern textbook on the subject”.^[18] However, it was not until the nineteenth century that medical professionals acknowledged pediatrics as a separate field of medicine. The first pediatric-specific publications appeared between the 1790s and the 1920s.^[19] The term pediatrics was first introduced in English in 1859 by Dr. Abraham Jacobi. In 1860, he became “the first dedicated professor of pediatrics in the world.”^[20] Pediatrics as a specialized field of medicine continued to develop in the mid-19th century; German physician Abraham Jacobi (1830–1919) is known as the father of American pediatrics because of his many contributions to the field.^[21][22] He received his medical training in Germany and later practiced in New York City.^{[citation needed]}

The first generally accepted pediatric hospital is the Hôpital des Enfants Malades (French: Hospital for Sick Children), which opened in Paris in June 1802 on the site of a previous orphanage.^[23] From its beginning, this famous hospital accepted patients up to the age of fifteen years,^[24] and it continues to this day as the pediatric division of the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital, created in 1920 by merging with the physically contiguous Necker Hospital, founded in 1778.

In other European countries, the Charité (a hospital founded in 1710) in Berlin established a separate Pediatric Pavilion in 1830, followed by similar institutions at Saint Petersburg in 1834, and at Vienna and Breslau (now Wrocław), both in 1837. In 1852 Britain’s first pediatric hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street was founded by Charles West.^[23] The first Children’s hospital in Scotland opened in 1860 in Edinburgh.^[25] In the US, the first similar institutions were the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which opened in 1855, and then Boston Children’s Hospital (1869).^[26] Subspecialties in pediatrics were created at the Harriet Lane Home at Johns Hopkins by Edwards A. Park.^[27]