In this issue the article by Hansman and Maresh on "A Longitudinal Study of Skeletal Maturation" is highly recommended to those who are interested in how children grow. The extra time required to assimilate the authors' interpretations of carefully collected original data will be time well spent and, if it weakens some of your sacred and long-held beliefs, you may wish to pursue the subject further by consulting other authors from the References. Pediatricians will find the articles by Stuart,1-2 Sontag,3 and Reynolds4 of particular interest.
Among the concepts to be gleaned from the paper by Drs. Hansman and Maresh, the following should be particularly useful in the clinical problems of pediatrics
1. The term "bone age" tends to be extremely misleading. It is a very undesirable term which should be eliminated from our medical terminology. To the uninitiated, a child with a bone age of 6