ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the criteria according to which children were distinguished from adults in the eighteenth century. It focuses on ill or handicapped children, particularly those of the lower classes, located in southern Germany and northern Switzerland. From a modem perspective, the early entrance of children into the workforce is striking because it creates the impression that working children were regarded as small adults and that the term child was applied exclusively to very young children. The diseases of children that are mentioned in the sources can only be compared to a certain extent to present-day paediatric categories. There were physical handicaps such as blindness, deafness or paralysis, as well as mental disorders or neuropathies like epilepsy. These sufferings can be divided into two types, to each of which the children’s social environment reacted differently: severe acute diseases and accidents on the one hand, and chronic or incurable illnesses and handicaps on the other.
