The Public Child

Abstract

Like proper growth and nutrition, treatable conditions afflicting a child’s body became a focus of intense concern among child welfare advocates. By the close of the nineteenth century new standards for children’s physical care expected adults to align their therapeutic choices with the latest views promoted by physicians trained in scientific medicine. Seeking professional medical care now fell within an expanding rubric of duties that adults owed to children and failure to do so constituted medical neglect—an adult infraction that had not been conceivable when medical science had little to offer in the way of preventing and treating childhood disease and death. Increasingly, medical attendance came to be framed as a child’s right.