Child Health Supervision–is It Worth It?

It is something of a paradox that pediatricians should question the worth of child health supervision, "the foundation of pediatrics," as a recent statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics has asserted.1 It was the concepts of prevention, education, and counsel rather than the peculiarities of children's disease which set Cadogan, Armstrong and John Bunnell Davis apart from other English physicians in the Age of Enlightenment. It was the linkage of child health supervision to the swell of social reform at the turn of the present century which sowed the seeds of pediatrics as a specialty in the United States.