Children's public health policy in the United States: how the past can inform the future.

As we struggle to respond to child public health problems in the twenty-first century, the past provides many core lessons. This paper explores three of them: the need to focus on the environment that makes children sick rather than on sick children; the need to attack the biggest problems, not the most scientifically interesting ones; and the need to provide services where children are most likely to be. To illuminate these lessons, we discuss important child public health efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.