Development of the human body used to approximately judge a child's age based on physical development. Puberty is the process of physical changes through which a child's body matures into an adult body capable of sexual reproduction. It is initiated by hormonal signals from the brain to the gonads: the ovaries in a girl, the testes in a boy. In response to the signals, the gonads produce hormones that stimulate libido and the growth, function, and transformation of the brain, bones, muscle, blood, skin, hair, breasts, and sex organs. Physical growth—height and weight—accelerates in the first half of puberty and is completed when an adult
History of beliefs about the human body as Traditional chinese medicine, or western, which follows the Greek traditions of science and is more closely related to modern science despite original anatomists and ideas of the body being just as unscientific as Chinese practices. In Western historical research, scholars began investigating the cultural history of the human body in detail in the 1980s. The movement is particularly associated with the historian of medicine Roy Porter, whose 1991 article 'History of the Body' was a seminal study. 1995 saw the foundation of the journal "Body and Society", by which time the field of the history of the body was