["Children are, generally, more difficult to cure than adults". Young patients in the consultory correspondence of the early 18th century].

Since Philippe Ariès' History of Childhood scholars have been interested in the history of the sick child in the Early Modern Period. This paper adds one more case study to the current research. It analyses sources connected with the physician and surgeon Lorenz Heister: his handbooks on surgery (1719) and medicine (1744) on the one hand, which reflect the respective therapeutic ideal, and his consultation letters on the other hand, which enable us to have a closer look at Heister's therapeutic practice. It can be shown, albeit with the exception of the lower social classes, that in the case of illness it depended not so much on the age of the sick person than the "style" of the family concerned if expert advice was sought or not. Only one feature depended on age: with the young patients-by-post "surgical" diseases were more common than with adults. It seems that the surgeon's diagnosis "from outside" fitted better to the small patients than the physician's anamnesis-based proceeding.