Levene, Alysa (Author)
Siena, Kevin P. (Author)
Journal of Literature and Science
Volume: 6, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 1-17
Poor bodies were both worrying and threatening in the eighteenth century. Medical depictions of poverty in discussions of contagious diseases presented it as degrading the human constitution with dangerous ramifications for pathology. High levels of infant and child mortality also forced reflection about the seemingly precarious health of society's youngest. Thus the poor and children were each in their own ways portrayed as prone to illness and contagion in the eighteenth century. What, then, of poor children? Were they inherently sickly? The issue is not so simple for when the issues of poverty and childhood conjoined one encounters mixed messages. On the one hand, poor children were poor. In theory they presented similar contagious risks to those posed by their parents. And yet, certain elements that commonly coloured medical narratives about poverty were either absent in discussions of children or else deployed differently with different effects. Ambiguity thus characterises medical narratives on poor children, whether because discussions of children frequently lacked the heavy moralizing that so often characterised commentaries on the poor, or because different agents crafted such narratives in different contexts and with different concerns. This article will compare narratives found in medical treatises that sought to explain the causes of disease with a quite different viewpoint created by the authorities charged with the actual bodies of poor young children
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