Try this:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

xml = """<root>
  <item>Over the <ref id="river" /> and through the <ref id="woods" />.</item>
  <item>To Grandmother's <ref id="house" /> we go.</item>
</root>"""

root = ET.fromstring(xml)

for item in root:
    if item.text:
        print(item.text)
    for ref in item:
        print(ref)
        if ref.tail:
            print(ref.tail)

ElementTrees representation of "mixed content" is based on .text and .tail attributes. The .text of an element represents the text of the element up to the first child element. That child's .tail then contains the text of its parent following it. See the API doc.

You can iterate over all the "visit" tags directly under an element "element" like this:

for x in element.iter("visit"):

You can find the first direct child of element matching a certain tag with:

element.find( "visits" )

It looks like you will first have to locate the "visits" element, which is the parent of "visit", and then iterate through its "visit" children. Putting those together you'd have something like this:

for patient_element in root:
    print patient_element.tag 
    visits_element = patient_element.find( "visits" )
    for visit_element in visits_element.iter("visit"):
        print visit_element.tag, visit_element.text
        # ... further processing of each visit element here

In general look at the section "Finding interesting elements" in the documentation for xml.etree.ElementTree: http://docs.python.org/2/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#finding-interesting-elements

In your for loop, it should be

child.text

not

root[0].text

To iterate over all nodes, use the iter method on the ElementTree, not the root Element.

The root is an Element, just like the other elements in the tree and only really has context of its own attributes and children. The ElementTree has the context for all Elements.

For example, given this xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data>
    <country name="Liechtenstein">
        <rank>1</rank>
        <year>2008</year>
        <gdppc>141100</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Austria" direction="E"/>
        <neighbor name="Switzerland" direction="W"/>
    </country>
    <country name="Singapore">
        <rank>4</rank>
        <year>2011</year>
        <gdppc>59900</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Malaysia" direction="N"/>
    </country>
    <country name="Panama">
        <rank>68</rank>
        <year>2011</year>
        <gdppc>13600</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Costa Rica" direction="W"/>
        <neighbor name="Colombia" direction="E"/>
    </country>
</data>

You can do the following

>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
>>> tree = ET.parse('test.xml')
>>> for elem in tree.iter():
...     print elem
... 
<Element 'data' at 0x10b2d7b50>
<Element 'country' at 0x10b2d7b90>
<Element 'rank' at 0x10b2d7bd0>
<Element 'year' at 0x10b2d7c50>
<Element 'gdppc' at 0x10b2d7d10>
<Element 'neighbor' at 0x10b2d7e90>
<Element 'neighbor' at 0x10b2d7ed0>
<Element 'country' at 0x10b2d7f10>
<Element 'rank' at 0x10b2d7f50>
<Element 'year' at 0x10b2d7f90>
<Element 'gdppc' at 0x10b2d7fd0>
<Element 'neighbor' at 0x10b2db050>
<Element 'country' at 0x10b2db090>
<Element 'rank' at 0x10b2db0d0>
<Element 'year' at 0x10b2db110>
<Element 'gdppc' at 0x10b2db150>
<Element 'neighbor' at 0x10b2db190>
<Element 'neighbor' at 0x10b2db1d0>

You have to get the children of the child and iterate through all of the grandchildren

tree = ET.parse('command_details.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

for child in root:

    if child.attrib['major'] == str(hex(int(major_bits[::-1], 2))) and child.attrib['minor'] == str(hex(int(minor_bits[::-1], 2))):
        command_name = str(child.attrib['name'])    
        for grandchild in child.getchildren():
            print str(grandchild.attrib['bytes'])
            print str(grandchild.attrib['descrip'])

Or if you want to print the full XML line, you can do:

print ET.tostring(grandchild).strip()

xml.ElementTree.Element supports the iterator protocol, so you can use list(elem) as follows:

import xml.etree.cElementTree as ET

s = '''
<Node1>
  <Node11>
    <Node21>
    </Node21>
    <Node22>
    </Node22>
    <Node23>
    </Node23>
  </Node11>
  <Node12>
  </Node12>
  <Node13>
  </Node13>
</Node1>
'''

root = ET.fromstring(s)

print root
print list(root)