Abstract
Unlike the politics of surgery between the 1880s and the First World War, the history of the child has been extensively pursued. The demographic, socioeconomic and ideological conditions that contributed to the late-Victorian and Edwardian preoccupation with, and revaluation of, childhood are now familiar. Known too, in large part, are the shifting philanthropic and state political responses to childhood poverty, illness, deprivation and abuse, to say nothing of ‘deviancy’, delinquency and ‘degeneracy’.1 It is also widely acknowledged that as education became compulsory after 1870, so the schoolroom took on the character of a laboratory for the medicopsychological surveillance, control and testing of children. Very largely, this was the site where childhood was reconstructed in predominantly psychological and medical terms.
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Notes
See Deborah Dwork, War is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: a history of the infant and child welfare movement in England, 1898–1918 (1987);
Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: child and maternal welfare in England, 1900–1939 (1980);
George K. Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870–1908 (Stanford, 1982);
Harry Hendrick, Images of Youth: age, class and the male youth problem, 1880–1920 (Oxford, 1990); and idem, ‘Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: an interpretative survey, 1800 to the present’ in A. Prout and A. James (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (Basingstoke, 1990), pp. 35–59.
See K.W. Jones, ‘Sentiment and Science: the late nineteenth century pediatrician as mother’s advisor’, J. Soc. Hist., 17 (1983–4), pp. 79–96;
Sydney Halpern, American Pediatrics: the social dynamics of professionalism, 1880–1980 (Berkeley, 1988); and
Rosemary Stevens, American Medicine and the Public Interest (New Haven, 1971), p. 200.
See Nikolas Rose, The Psychological Complex: psychology, politics and society in England, 1869–1939 (1985);
Margo Horn, Before It’s Too Late: the child guidance movement in the United States, 1922–1945 (Philadelphia, 1989);
Gillian Sutherland, Ability, Merit and Measurement: mental testing and English education, 1880–1940 (Oxford, 1984); and
Adrian Wooldridge, ‘Child Study and Educational Psychology in England, 1880–1950’, DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1985. Cf.
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 years of the experts’ advice to women (1979), ch. 6: ‘The Century of the Child’.
See Central Council for the Care of Crippled Children, Directory of Orthopaedic Institutions, Voluntary Organisations and Official Schemes for the Welfare of Cripples (1935); Burdett’s Hospitals and Charities Annual (1930); Charity Organization Society, Charities Annual and Register, 1902–1930; and D.G. Pritchard, Education and the Handicapped, 1760–1960 (1963). Unless otherwise indicated, information on the societies for the physically handicapped referred to in this chapter is drawn from these sources.
See Clark Nardinelli, Child Labour and the Industrial Revolution (Indiana, 1990). Children nevertheless continued to be victims of industrial accidents. See
C.P. Hampson, Salford Through the Ages (Salford, 1930; reprinted 1972), pp. 195–200; and
A. Clerke, The Effects of the Factory System (1899), pp. 108–13.
[Ebba de Ramsay], A Few More Steps Onward! last year’s experience of a cripples’ home in Sweden, by a Swedish lady 1878), p. 6. See also the letter from the Manchester Guardian quoted in
Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) in Marx and Engels, On Britain (2nd edn, Moscow, 1962), p. 315.
Vivian A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: the changing social value of children (New York, 1985). See also
Carolyn Steedman, ‘Bodies, Figures and Physiology: Margaret McMillan and the late nineteenth-century remaking of working class childhood’ in Roger Cooter (ed.), In the Name of the Child: health and welfare, 1880–1940 (1992), pp. 19–44. The transformation also coincided with the fall in infant mortality and the decline in the national birth rate. See
Anders Brandstom and Lars-Goran Tedebrand (eds), Society, Health and Population during the Demographic Transition (Stockholm, 1988); and
Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop J., 5 (1978), pp. 6–65.
Cited in H. Osmond-Clarke, ‘Half a Century of Orthopaedic Progress in Great Britain’, JBJS, 32B (1950), p. 620.
Madeline Rooff, Voluntary Societies and Social Policy (1957), p. 11;
Charles R. Henderson, Introduction to the Study of the Dependent, Defective and Delinquent Classes, and of Their Social Treatment (Boston, 1901), pp. 138ff.; and Pritchard, Education and the Handicapped, pp. 153ff. Burdett, Hospitals and Charities Annual for 1930 (pp. 719–25) lists 68 surviving settlements, 40 in London, 24 in the provinces and 4 in Scotland.
See A. J. Kidd, ‘Charity Organization and the Unemployed in Manchester, c. 1870–1914’, Social Hist., 9 (1984), pp. 45–66 at p. 62.
Robert Bremner (ed.), Childhood and Youth in America: a documentary history, vol. 1: 1600–1865 (Harvard, 1970), p. 758.
E. D. Telford, The Problem of the Crippled Child (Manchester, 1910), p. 7.
Joseph Bell, ‘Five Years’ Surgery’, Edin. Hosp. Reports, 1 (1893), pp. 466–74 at p. 467.
Charles Macalister, The Origins and History of the Royal Liverpool Country Hospital For Children at Heswall from the time of its inception (1895–1898) and foundation (1899) to the year 1930 (Campden, Glous., 1930).
See W. S. Craig, John Thomson: pioneer and father of Scottish paediatrics, 1856–1926 (Edinburgh, 1968), esp. p. 22;
Janet Penrose Trevelyan, Evening Play Centres for Children, the story of their origin and growth, with a preface by Mrs Humphry Ward (1920); ‘Edinburgh Cripple and Invalid Children’s Aid Society’, The Child, 4 (1913), pp. 196–8; and Thomson, ‘On Home Care and Treatment of Physically Defective Infants and Young Children’, Br. J. Childr. Dis., 21 (1924), pp. 263–8.
See Janet Hill, ‘Mary Dendy, Her Life and Her Work for the Permanent Care of the Feebleminded In the Manchester Area’, Honours Paper, Department of Biology and Geology, Manchester University, 1984. For critical background, see Joanna Ryan and Frank Taylor, The Politics of Mental Handicap (Harmondsworth, 1980), ch. 5.
Francis Warner, MD, FRCP, ‘Results of an Inquiry as to the Physical and Mental Condition of Fifty Thousand Children seen in One Hundred and Six Schools’, J. Roy. Stat. Soc, 56 (1893), pp. 71–100; and the follow-up study, ibid., 59 (1896), pp. 125–68.
See A. H. Hogarth, Medical Inspection of Schools (1909); and
George Newman, The Building of a Nation’s Health (1939). For background on the medical inspection of schoolchildren, see also Kerr, Fundamentals, and
William Mackenzie and E. Matthew, The Medical Inspection of School Children (Edinburgh, 1904).
Charles Webster, ‘The Health of the School Child During the Depression’, in Nicholas Parry and David McNair (eds), The Fitness of the Nation: physical and health education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Leicester, 1983), p. 74.
E. Muirhead Little and Mary Little, ‘A Hospital School for Cripples’, Trans. 2nd Intern. Congress on School Hygiene, 2 (1907), pp. 757–62.
Gillette, ‘State Care of Indigent Crippled Children’, Trans. Amer. Orthop. Assn., 12 (1899), pp. 249–53; ‘State Care of Indigent Crippled and Deformed Children’, Proc. Nat. Conf. Charities and Correction, 1904, pp. 285–94; idem., ‘Care of Cripples’, AJOS, 6 (1909), pp. 723–6; E. Reeves, ‘Minnesota State Hospital for Crippled Children’, Amer. Baby (July 1911), pp. 37–9; and Osgood, ‘Progress’, p. 224. On Gillette (1864–1921) see obituary in JOS, 3 (1921), pp. 159–60, 246–8.
Henry H. Kessler, The Crippled and the Disabled: rehabilitation of the physically handicapped in the United States (New York, 1935), pp. 35ff. See also ‘Recent Progress in the State of Crippled and Deformed Children’, N.Y.MedJ., 30 Jan. 1904 (editorial), pp. 217–18;
H. Winnett Orr, ‘Duty of the State in the Care of Crippled and Deformed Children’, Detroit Med. J., 5 (1905–6), pp. 195–8; idem., ‘Reason for the State Aid of the Crippled and Deformed; Some of the Problems Involved’, AJOS, 9 (1911), pp. 218–23; and
D.C. McMurtrie, ‘The Advantages of, And The Need for State Care of Crippled Children’, Ohio State Med. J., 8 (1912), pp. 207–9.
See Linda Bryder, Under the Magic Mountain (Oxford, 1988) and
F. B. Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis, 1850–1950 (1988).
See Marjorie Cruickshank, ‘The Open-air School Movement in English Education’, Paedagogica Historica, 17 (1977), pp. 62–74; and Linda Bryder, ‘“Wonderlands of Buttercup, Clover and Daisies”: the open-air school movement, 1907–1939’, in Cooter (ed.), Name of the Child, pp. 72–95.
See G. R. Girdlestone, ‘The Modern Treatment of Tuberculosis of the Bones and Joints’, JBJS, 6 (1924), pp. 519–37 at p. 532.
Josep Trueta, Gathone Robert Girdlestone (Oxford, 1971), p. 41. Girdlestone confessed himself ‘infected with orthopaedics’ after having been ‘touched’ by Jones. See ‘Orthopaedic Influence on the Treatment of Fractures’, Lancet, 13 Nov. 1943, pp. 593–5.
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© 1993 Roger Cooter
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Cooter, R. (1993). The Cause of the Crippled Child. In: Surgery and Society in Peace and War. Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10235-5_4
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