The Alienisation of Childhood and Adolescence in France and Scotland, 1870-1914

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the medical gaze turned itself upon the child and the adolescent, promoted them as new objects of science. In both Scotland and France, an alliance between political and medical men was formed to deal with their respective demographic crisis: public health, hygiene, as well as personal behaviours were targeted to improve child health. Both nations developed similar anxieties and fears over their population growth, and addressed these challenges in a similar way - through the introduction of pieces of legislations as well as formulating social and medical precepts promoting child welfare. Yet, some crucial differences in their implementation emphasise distinct approaches to the medicalisation of childhood and adolescence, which would ultimately bear consequence to the ‘alienisation’ of both periods of life. This paper addresses the question of child and adolescent development and its interpretation within psychiatric discourses in both France and Scotland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It will stress out how paediatrics became a separate field of study in both countries, signing off different perspectives to the question of the young body in health and sickness. This will allow us to understand how the medicalisation of childhood and adolescence, under the influence of evolutionary psychology and pedagogy, concurred to form different discursive traditions on mental abnormality in young people. In other words, this paper will show how the emergence of child and adolescent psychiatry sits at the crossroads of competing, yet complementing, medical, psychological, social and educationist discourses.