Medical Men, Negligent Mothers, and Malleable Children
This chapter considers the medicalization of childhood from the late eighteenth century into the 1840s. What we might now term a ‘biological’ definition of childhood is seen first in late eighteenth-century medical intervention into the care of infants. These texts are part of a wider ‘rationalization’ of childhood which emerged in scientific and child-rearing genres. The influence in Ireland of John Locke, William Buchan, and the Edgeworths’ contributed to a reformulation of childhood as a period of enormous intellectual and physical malleability. As the matter of children’s health shifted from the female domain to the business of men, medical professionals defined the child body in opposition to the adult male body. Elite women were criticized for coddling their children excessively, while the lower classes were characterized as neglectful and uncaring. By the mid-nineteenth century, objective standards of growth were deployed as mechanisms for governing parental as much as childhood behaviour.