Abstract Summary
During the 19th century children moved into the focus of a blossoming material and media culture. A growing market of parent advice literature, newspapers, and magazines offered information on topics ranging from baby care and nutrition to social and moral education. An increasingly broad range of toys and educational devices, such as baby walkers and writing helps, sought to assist and discipline the child during learning. While this vivid material and media culture has obtained some attention from scholars in the history of childhood, it has hardly been exploited as a source basis for the history of science and medicine. Yet, this paper argues that the evolving media and material culture of childhood is of considerable importance for understanding how the child became a subject of knowledge. Notably, a focus on media allows tracing how ideas about normal and pathological development were gradually articulated in the public sphere and thus sheds light on the conditions under which children could move into the focus of scientific inquiry. The paper will concentrate on newspapers, medical and scientific journals, and trade magazines in central Europe (German speaking lands and Switzerland) in the early to mid-nineteenth century and explore how children gradually became ‘children of science’ and medicine.
