ABSTRACT
Recent studies by psychologists and anthropologists working from modern theories of socialization, have begun to redress our ignorance of children's experiences of illness and health care. And, although we cannot recover many aspects of children's experiences in medicine, we can use these sources to reconstruct an external picture of the child in medical situations, studying the demographics of practice, the social geography of medical interactions, and the types of procedures children experienced or were denied. As this work suggests, in addition to first-hand accounts, historical sources from advertising and sales data for patent medicine to instrument catalogs showing devices developed for treating small patients offer important pieces of evidence about children's experiences. A limitation is variation in children's experiences according to their race, class, and gender, their cultural, religious, geographic and national diversity, across time, and by diagnosis. Despite these differences, fundamental changes occurred in the twentieth century that in turn transformed all children's experiences with medicine.
