ABSTRACT
Children as a class are commonly seen as wonderful. Children seemed to be held to be wonderful for what they were in themselves – they had a special quality of beauty. This chapter examines the ways in which doctors make recourse to everyday modes of talk about children as a means of neutralising doubts about a child's identity. It provides a variety of features of 'children' to which doctors made appeal, their separate nature, their intelligibility and their potential adulthood. In City clinics the Health Department ran a screening programme for all children of six and twelve months of age. The most striking feature of Local Authority assessment was its consistent demedicalisation. The amount of role-taking was rather greater than for the newborn, but the descriptions used were less extravagant. The follow-up clinic saw all children about whom there had been sufficient medical doubt at birth to admit them to the Special Nursery in the Maternity Hospital.
