Levene, Alysa (Author)
Siena, Kevin P. (Author)
Journal of Literature and Science
Volume: 6, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 1-17
Publication date: 2013
Language: English
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
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Sharpe, Pamela;
(2012)
Explaining the Short Stature of the Poor: Chronic Childhood Disease and Growth in Nineteenth-Century England
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001320058/)
Chapter
Pomfret, David M.;
(2013)
“Beyond Risk of Contagion”: Childhood, Hill Stations, and the Planning of British and French Colonial Cities
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001214655/)
Article
Newton, Hannah;
(2011)
“Very Sore Nights and Days”: The Child's Experience of Illness in Early Modern England, c. 1580--1720
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001230154/)
Article
Fan, Tiequan;
Chen, Xing;
(2013)
The Ai You Association during the Republic of China
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001200173/)
Book
Catherine Carstairs;
Bethany Philpott;
Sara Wilmshurst;
(2018)
Be Wise! Be Healthy!: Morality and Citizenship in Canadian Public Health Campaigns
(/p/isis/citation/CBB480455058/)
Article
Day, Alison;
(2013)
“The Magical Formula”: Reactions and Responses to Diphtheria Immunisation in New Zealand 1920--1960
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001421858/)
Book
Patrizia Cincinnati;
(2023)
Note sulla storia della pediatria in Italia dall'unità al secondo dopoguerra
(/p/isis/citation/CBB960123901/)
Book
Williams, Gareth;
(2013)
Paralysed with Fear: The Story of Polio
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001550915/)
Article
Helen Vandenberg;
Wanda Martin;
Marie Dietrich Leurer;
Andrea Ens;
(2021)
The History of Saskatchewan’s Public Health Association Policy Initiatives, 1954–86: A Regional Comparison for Preventative Health Policy Work in Canada
(/p/isis/citation/CBB049962933/)
Article
Arnold, David J.;
(2012)
The Medicalization of Poverty in Colonial India
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001213112/)
Article
Miller, Edgar;
(2013)
“Pauper Lunatics and their Treatment,” by Joshua Harrison Stallard (1870)
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001320339/)
Book
Mac Lellan, Anne;
Mauger, Alice;
(2013)
Growing Pains: Childhood Illness in Ireland 1750--1950
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001552387/)
Book
White, Kevin;
(2001)
Early Sociology of Health and Illness
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000101622/)
Book
Thomas J. Bollyky;
(2018)
Plagues and the Paradox of Progress: Why the World Is Getting Healthier in Worrisome Ways
(/p/isis/citation/CBB703607686/)
Article
Evensen, Darrick T.;
Clarke, Christopher E.;
(2012)
Efficacy Information in Media Coverage of Infectious Disease Risks: An Ill Predicament?
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001320113/)
Book
Bynum, Helen;
(2012)
Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001200914/)
Thesis
Reinhardt, Robert Holbrook;
(2012)
Remaking Bodily Environments: The Global Eradication of Smallpox
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001561026/)
Book
John Theilmann;
(2022)
Disease and Society in Premodern England
(/p/isis/citation/CBB618361645/)
Book
Connolly, Cynthia A.;
(2008)
Saving Sickly Children: The Tuberculosis Preventorium in American Life, 1909--1970
(/p/isis/citation/CBB000831226/)
Book
Gestrich, Andreas;
Hurren, Elizabeth T.;
King, Steven;
(2012)
Poverty and Sickness in Modern Europe: Narratives of the Sick Poor, 1780--1938
(/p/isis/citation/CBB001213554/)
Be the first to comment!