ABSTRACT
Medical and psychological theories of childhood overlapped with pedagogical theory regularly in the period, and not simply in their shared reliance on the work of Locke and Rousseau. 1 Writers in one field regularly dabbled in the other. For example, Erasmus Darwin, a physician and scientist by profession (and Charles Darwin's grandfather), devised a plan for the administration of female boarding schools, Female Education in Boarding Schools (1797), and Joseph Priestley wrote on the subject of education as well. Most pedagogues and children's writers were themselves not experts in contemporary psychological or pediatric theory. Much of the information generated in these fields would, however, have reached them through such media as the lay medical advice book and pamphlets or journals summarizing recent developments in science for the nonexpert. Some pedagogical writers, such as Maria Edgeworth (whose brother-in-law was the physician Thomas Beddoes, discussed in the previous chapter), were obviously quite familiar with these specialized discourses. For educationalists and writers for children, knowledge of the workings of the human mind was essential, since their principal concerns were the formation of children's minds and the regulation of their behavior toward a greater social good. Since, in the period, it was widely accepted that body and mind were parts of the same machine, systems for managing the physical health of children would also have been of interest to the pedagogical writer.
