ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century, mainly since the late 1740s, enlightened physicians and medical practitioners in different parts of Europe published an unprecedented number of works on the ‘preservation’, ‘management’, and ‘physical education’ of children. This chapter explores how the words whose reiteration in the titles strikes the contemporary reader linked medical goals with political, economic, moral and pedagogical concerns. The intense medical interest in childhood and children to which these works attest constituted an attempt to bring the entire domain of infant and child care under the purview of medicine, and in so doing to claim that the doctor’s role and responsibility was not just to diagnose and treat the diseases of childhood but to guide the treatment of all infants and children. The circulation of medical texts and medical knowledge called into being new roles, identities, relations and goals – for the doctor, the child, the nurse and the parents.
