Webster's New World Medical Dictionary

child abuse
A complex set of behaviors that
include child neglect and the physical, emotional,
and sexual abuse of children. Although most people
think first of physical abuse when they hear the term
child abuse, physical abuse makes up only a small
percentage of reported cases. Physical abuse is
defined as physical injury inflicted upon the child
with cruel and/or malicious intent, although the law
recognizes that in some cases the parent or care-
taker may not have intended to hurt the child;
rather, the injury may have resulted from excessive
discipline or physical punishment. Physical abuse
includes punching, beating, kicking, biting, burn-
ing, shaking, or otherwise physically harming a
child. Injuries that can be fatal include severe head
trauma, shaken baby syndrome, trauma to the
abdomen or chest, scalding, burns, drowning, suf-
focation, and poisoning. Child abuse should always
be reported, investigated, and stopped.
child health
The care and treatment of children.
Child health is the purview of pediatrics, which
became a medical specialty in the mid-nineteenth
century. Before that time the care and treatment of
childhood diseases were included within such areas
as general medicine, obstetrics, and midwifery.
childbed fever
Fever due to an infection after
childbirth, usually of the placental site within the
uterus. If the infection involves the bloodstream, it
constitutes puerperal sepsis. Childbed fever was
once a common cause of death for women of child-
bearing age, but it is now comparatively rare in the
developed world due to improved sanitary practices
in midwifery and obstetrics. Also known as child-
birth fever and puerperal fever.
childbirth
See
labor.
childbirth fever
See 
childbed fever.