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CHAPTER ONE The Making of a Child Abuse Pediatrician and the Birth of a New Specialty Child abuse pediatrics did not begin in 2006 when the American Board of Pediatrics formally recognized it as a certifi ed specialty of pediatrics. Its origins can be traced back to the late 19th century with the published work of one physician, French forensic pathologist Ambroise Tardieu. Prior to his publications, child abuse as a medical phenomenon, or even as a social one, was rarely described, much less recognized, and there were vanishingly few references to child abuse in the medical literature of the past two centuries (Lynch 1985). Most injuries to infants and children were presumed to be accidents, sometimes self-infl icted, or occasionally infl icted by other children, but never infl icted by an adult caretaker. The terms “child abuse” and “battered child syndrome” had not yet come into existence. Ambroise Tardieu was a professor of forensic medicine at the Univer- sity of Paris who published three detailed studies on child abuse. Yet, even with these remarkable studies, child abuse would be ignored by medical science for another 100 years until the publication of papers in the United States in the mid-20th century. Tardieu’s work itself was only formally recognized with the presenta- tion on September 20, 2003, of “Ambroise Tardieu: The Man and His Work on Child Maltreatment a Century Before Kempe” by Doctor Jean Labbe, a pediatrician from Laval University Quebec, Canada, to the Ray Helfer Society, an international society of child abuse physicians.