Since the advent of modernity, technological, scientific, economic, social and cultural dynamics have fostered a growing interest in the quantity and quality of people, and consequently in child's growth and development. The confluence of these conditions gave rise to a kind of rationality that, starting from the ancestral knowledge of people's growth, focused on the issues that influenced growth, as well as on the characteristics that could explain it. The aim of this work is to present data from medical and pedagogical literature printed in Portugal, with a view to promote an understanding of how child's development was perceived since the end of the 18th century up to the first third of the 20th century. It is our goal to focus on somatic and psychological data available on the aforementioned literature, as well as on the perceptions of development.
Childhood; Development; Pedology