University of Galway History Seminar: ‘How should I raise and care for my child?’ Early child health writing for a general audience in Europe (1850-1914)

University of Galway History Research Seminar

‘How should I raise and care for my child?’ Early child health writing for a general audience in Europe (1850-1914)

Dr Anna Gasperini (University of Galway) 

Abstract
The period between mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth century saw the rise of childcare handbooks written for a general audience in Europe and North America. Still a popular genre after almost two centuries, childcare manuals were usually penned by medical specialists to educate the public, mostly mothers, about how to ensure that a child survived their first years of life. These texts came in a range of formats: from booklets and pamphlets, cheaper or sometimes even distributed for free, containing few key-instructions on child nutrition and management; to expensive, exquisitely decorated hardbacks, covering a broad variety of topics. Sometimes they addressed the reader directly, even simulating a conversation; sometimes they simply consisted of a list of instructions, with little to no acknowledgment of the reader.

Why did such a genre start at this time, and how? What do these texts tell us about cultural and social notions and hierarchies underpinning child health writing in the early days of pediatrics? What do they tell us about how pediatricians started talking about child health to a general audience? This talk addresses these questions based on the preliminary findings of the IRC Starting Laureate project MILC – MedIcal Literature and Communication about Child health (1850-1914). The talk examines a set of key-features of childcare handbooks in Italian, French, and English, identifying transnational elements in the textual and discursive structure of the texts and highlighting the key-role literature played as the chosen medium for early conversations about childhood between pediatricians and the public.

Biography
Dr Anna Gasperini holds an IRC Starting Laureate grant at University of Galway, where she is Principal Investigator of MILC – MedIcal Literature and Communication about Child health (1850-1914), a comparative transnational study of childcare literature targeting the general public. From 2019 to 2021, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, where she developed FED – Feeding, Educating, Dieting: A Transnational Approach to Nutrition Discourses in Children’s Narratives (Britain and Italy, 1850-1900). She is the author of Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine, and Anatomy – The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Registration

This is an in-person event, in Room G010, Hardiman Research Building, University of Galway (ground floor). For those of you not able to attend in person, the talk will also be streamed on Zoom: https://universityofgalway-ie.zoom.us/j/98396342366.

To attend via Zoom, please register at: https://forms.office.com/e/08f42zgsmu

This talk is part of the University of Galway History Seminar series and organised jointly with the Centre for the Study of Religion at the Moore Institute.