IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB171852329

Constructing Moral Babies: The Medical and Scientific Enterprise of Infancy in America, 1850s–1920s (2022)

Wall, John (Advisor)
Yang, Elisabeth M. (Author)

Wall, John
Rutgers University

URI: http://www.proquest.com/docview/2638940771/abstract/11404E3F37F844B0PQ/90

Publication Date: 2022
Physical Details: 217
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Medicine and society Education Social sciences Medicine Moral and ethical aspects Infant care Child development 20th century, early 19th century United States

Constructing “Moral Babies” traces the discourse on the moral agency of infants and how physicians, scientists, and child-rearing authorities have conceptualized infancy and morality in America from the 1850s to the 1920s. This dissertation is an intellectual and cultural history that takes an interdisciplinary approach—one that draws on the history of medicine, sociology, feminist theology, childhood studies, and material culture—, investigating a critical period in American history that saw the infant as a significant medical, scientific, political, and cultural object and subject. This dissertation contributes to existing historical scholarship by going beyond just affirming the entanglement of the moral, spiritual, and scientific in infant health and science to argue that the medical and scientific communities during this period frequently understood infants as moral agents, that is, as actively engaged in moral choices of their own accord. Drawing on various sources such as child-rearing manuals, domestic medicine guides, design books, and babies’ material culture, the dissertation argues that while historians have often viewed this period as the ascendancy of medicine’s focus on the physiological aspects of the infant, there were complex and lively debates on infants’ iii moral nature and understanding infants’ moral agency. The chapters of the dissertation explore the aforementioned topics in three different contexts: (1) the communities of scientific experts and the syncretism of science and religion that composed a nuanced and complex image of infants; (2) the asymmetric alliances forged between physicians and white, middle-class American mothers and the subtext of written counsel from expert to mother; and (3) the material world of babies, as imagined by medical prescriptions for the construction and design of nurseries, and the selection and use of baby furniture, toys, and devices. This project addresses fundamental questions of how morality was construed and how the infant was positioned and used in this enterprise. Introducing a marginalized figure, this dissertation foregrounds infants as innovative sites of inquiry about agency, citizenship, personhood, and morality.

...More

Citation URI

http://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB171852329/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Matteo Loconsole; (2019)
Educazione e sessualità: Gli almanacchi di Paolo Mantegazza (1866-1905) (/isis/citation/CBB513542250/)

Article Clementine Beauvais; (2016)
Ages and Ages: The Multiplication of Children’s ‘ages’ in Early Twentieth-century Child Psychology (/isis/citation/CBB626912820/)

Article Zenderland, Leila; (2013)
Social Science as a “Weapon of the Weak”: Max Weinreich, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, and the Study of Culture, Personality, and Prejudice (/isis/citation/CBB001321222/)

Thesis Reedy, Elizabeth Ann; (2000)
Ripe too early: The expansion of hospital based premature infant care in the United States, 1922-1950 (/isis/citation/CBB001562654/)

Book Smuts, Alice Boardman; (2006)
Science in the Service of Children, 1893--1935 (/isis/citation/CBB000741079/)

Thesis Maybrey, Catherine R.; (2005)
From Onanism to Orgasm: Masturbation, Medicine and Gender in America, 1646--1953 (/isis/citation/CBB001561916/)

Book Shah, Nayan; (2001)
Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (/isis/citation/CBB000101127/)

Article David Ceccarelli; (2021)
Theistic evolution and evolutionary ethics: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Huxley’s legacy (/isis/citation/CBB339183866/)

Article Duschinsky, Robbie; (2015)
The Emergence of the Disorganized/Disoriented (D) Attachment Classification, 1979--1982 (/isis/citation/CBB001550688/)

Article Armitage, Kevin C.; (2007)
“The Child Is Born a Naturalist”: Nature Study, Woodcraft Indians, and the Theory of Recapitulation (/isis/citation/CBB000742078/)

Article Shvarts, Shifra; (2000)
The development of mother and infant welfare centers in Israel, 1854-1954 (/isis/citation/CBB000111189/)

Article Oertzen, Christine von; (2013)
Science in the Cradle: Milicent Shinn and Her Home-Based Network of Baby Observers, 1890--1910 (/isis/citation/CBB001253067/)

Article Downs, Gregory P.; (2009)
University Men, Social Science, and White Supremacy in North Carolina (/isis/citation/CBB001030728/)

Article Noon, David Hoogland; (2004)
Situating Gender and Professional Identity in American Child Study, 1880--1910 (/isis/citation/CBB000450015/)

Thesis Guvenc-Salgirli, Sanem; (2009)
Eugenics as Science of the Social: A Case from 1930s Istanbul (/isis/citation/CBB001560786/)

Chapter Oelkers, Jürgen; (2008)
Elementary Textbooks in the 18th Century and Their Theory of the Learning Child (/isis/citation/CBB000951697/)

Article Daniel Scott Smith; (2022)
Social Scientization and the Schooling State in UK Parliamentary Discourse, 1803–1909 (/isis/citation/CBB035327462/)

Article Maria Cristina Petralia; Marinella Coco; Maria Sofia Basile; (2019)
The Light of Knowledge. Brief Historical Outline of Some of the Talented People Who Changed the Destiny of the Blind, from Haüy to Brail (/isis/citation/CBB001237127/)

Article Will Schupmann; Jonathan D. Moreno; (2020)
Belmont in Context (/isis/citation/CBB480211234/)

Book Timmermans, Stefan; Buchbinder, Mara; (2013)
Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening (/isis/citation/CBB001450630/)