ABSTRACT
The assessment and interpretation of growth is an essential part of care of the newborn infant, and its importance has been appreciated for most of the history of neonatology. Pierre Budin devotes a large part of his textbook from 1900, Le Nourrisson: Alimentation et hygiene. Enfants debiles et enfants nes a terme,1 to the description and assessment of the growth of the newborn infant. Building on the earlier work of Quetelet2 and Bowditch,3 he uses growth charts that will be immediately familiar to a modern reader. Against a grid composed of horizontal divisions marked in age, and a vertical axis of weight, he plots the weight of the individual infant and the “average” growth of “normal” infants1 (Figure 12.1). From the start of Lecture VI we read:
I have represented graphically the progress of the average infant’s weight during the first year . . . If a point be placed each week on this chart, in the space corresponding to the weight and age of the infant, the joining of the points will show the curve of its growth, and by comparison, whether it is inferior, equal, or superior to the normal. These charts are of great service both in hospital and in private practice.1 (p. 86)
One thing may strike us as unusual about Budin’s charts; his reference curve consists of a single smoothed line based on the average weight of an infant during the first year of life. No estimate of the variability around this average is presented, nor are differences between the genders mentioned.
