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Summary

Chapter 1 examines the interpretations of children’s language of pain, particularly screams and cries, by different professional bodies between 1870 and 1900. The chapter connects Charles Darwin’s evolutionist perspective inaugurated in ‘A Biographical Sketch of an Infant’ with the theoretical curiosity that informed embryologists’ and psychologists’ instrumental approach to pain, contrasting this with the practical paediatric challenge of understanding children to diagnose and treat them. This chapter also considers the photographic representations of sick children used for fundraising by the Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Situated between the history of pain, history of childhood and history of emotions, this innovative work explores cultural understandings of children's pain, from the 1870s to the end of the Second World War. Focusing on British medical discourse, Leticia Fernández-Fontecha examines the relationship between the experience of pain and its social and medical perception, looking at how pain is felt, seen and performed in contexts such as the hospital, the war nursery and the asylum. By means of a comparative study of views in different disciplines – physiology, paediatrics, psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis – this work demonstrates the various ways in which the child in pain came to be perceived. This context is vital to understanding current practices and beliefs surrounding childhood pain, and the role that children play in the construction of adult worlds.

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1 - The Language of Children’s Pain

Summary

Childhood, Pain and Emotion

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2 results

1 - The Language of Children’s Pain

Summary

Childhood, Pain and Emotion