MILC – “MedIcal Literature and Communication about Child Health (1850-1914)”

MILC is the first transnational comparative study of early popular childcare handbooks (1850-1914).

Mostly penned by medical professionals, these texts explained modern scientific knowledge about child health and childcare techniques in plain language to a general audience, and especially to pregnant women and mothers. As such, they are a crucial source of information on how communication about child health in Europe was started.

MILC examines a corpus of these texts produced in three European languages – English, Italian, and French combining distant reading, performed using a coding software, and close reading of a selection of case studies. The project analyses, and compare across different linguistic corpora, the discourses, themes, and strategies authors used to convey their scientific knowledge about child health to a non-specialist audience. These textual elements are analysed against the background of local national culture, society, conceptions of childhood and management of child health, and then compared across linguistic corpora. In so doing, the analysis also maps the transnational circulation of these discourses, themes, and strategies.

Goals 

• Identify what techniques the author used to establish their medical authority and tackle issues affecting child health
• Examine the power relationship these strategies created between author and reader, paediatricianand parent, scientist and member of the public

Research questions:

• How did the author frame child health for their target audience?
• How did the author address their target audience?
• What similarities and influences can we identify at international level?

Researchers

Dr Anna Gasperini, PI 

Dr Anna Gasperini is IRC Starting Laureate at the University of Galway, Ireland, where she researches  children’s health in the Nineteenth century and teaches children’s literature modules at the Children’s Studies Discipline (School of Education). She is a graduate of the University of Cagliari (B.A.), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Joint Master’s Degree in English and American Literary and Cultural Studies) and NUI Galway (D.Phil.).

In 2018 Anna was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship for her project FED Feeding, Educating, Dieting: A Transnational Approach to Nutrition Discourses in Children’s Narratives (Britain and Italy, 1850-1900), a comparative study on English and Italian nineteenth-century children’s literature and the history of child nutrition based at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. In October 2021, she was awarded the Marie Curie Plus One Postdoctoral Fellowship, an additional 12-month funding Ca’ Foscari University of Venice awards to select excellent MSCA Fellows after completion of their projects to apply for a major European Research Council funding scheme (Horizon Europe or ERC). As of September 2022, her research is funded by the Irish Research Council Laureate Award, a funding scheme for cutting-edge PI-led research. Her current project MILC – “MedIcal Literature and Communication about Child health (1850-1914)” is based at the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and the Discipline of Children’s Studies at the School of Education at the University of Galway.

Anna is the author of Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine, and Anatomy – The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Her research on nineteenth-century popular literature and the history of anatomy appeared in major medical humanities and popular literature collections (Scholl, Lesa Ed. Medicine, Health, and Being Human. New York and London: Routledge, 2018; Lill, Sarah Louise and Rohan McWilliam Eds. Edward Lloyd and his World: Popular Fiction, Politics and the Press in Victorian Britain. New York: Routledge, 2019). Her scholarship on transnational nineteenth-century child nutrition and children’s literature appeared OA in international journals (Rhesis – International Journal of Linguistics, Philology and Literature; Journal of Victorian Culture; Modern Languages Open. She co-edited with Professor Laura Tosi the special issue “Childhood and Food: Literary-Historical Perspectives (c. 19-20th centuries)” of the international journal Childhood in the Past (2022).

Contact: email anna.gasperini@universityofgalway.ie

Dr Maelle Leroux, Postdoctoral Researcher 

Dr Maelle Le Roux is a postdoctoral researcher on the IRC-funded MILC project, led by Dr Anna Gasperini. She is a social and cultural historian, with interests in modern Irish and French history, and especially representations, discourses and digital history methods. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Limerick on the representations of Irish nationalist figures in the Capuchin Annual (1930-1977). Some of her research results were published in the Journal of Digital History in 2021. She holds a Master degree in History from Paris Sorbonne, during which she worked on gender in children’s literature in twentieth century France, and on representations of the Easter Rising for children in Ireland.

Contact: email maelle.leroux@universityofgalway.ie 

Dr Marco Emanuele Omes, Postdoctoral Researcher 

Marco Emanuele Omes is a postdoctoral researcher on the IRC-funded MILC project, led by Dr Anna Gasperini. He has recently completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Milan (Italy), during which he studied the transformations of smallpox vaccination policies in the Italian States between 1800 and 1861. By means of a transnational and a comparative approach, his work investigates health laws and institutions, the conceptualisation of diseases, and scientific communication issues (i.e., the relationship between physicians and public authorities, or between professionals and laypeople) in the 19th century. Some of the project results have recently been published on Centaurus and Studi Storici.

Previously, Marco focused on the cultural history of politics of Napoleonic era during his doctoral studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy) and Sorbonne Université (France). His analysis of Napoleonic festivals in the context of the French hegemony over the European continent will soon be published (Rome, Viella, forthcoming in 2023). In the past few years, Marco was also research fellow at the German Historical Institute (Rome, Italy), the Leibniz Institute of European History (Mainz, Germany), and the Fondation Napoléon (Paris, France).

Contact: email marco.omes@universityofgalway.ie