Cradle to Grave Lecture 3 Child Poverty, Health and the State

Themes Today’s lecture: Child poverty, health and the state Social value of children Children’s medicine and paediatrics Next 2 lectures: School medicine Children and disease

Image of child as patient ‘A physician watching over a sick child’ 1893 Samuel Luke FildesSamuel Luke Fildes

Value of childhood/children Value to state (national efficiency) Indicator of social wellbeing (modern humane state) Priceless child (Viviana Zelizer) = less useful economically but emotionally ‘beyond price’ - associated with shift of child from labourer to child- scholar (1870 compulsory education introduced in England and Wales) Dovetailed with rising SofL, smaller families, and new institutions and laws to protect children e.g. Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1889)

Child workers to child pupils

Rickets in children Lack of sunlight, vitamin D

Seebohm Rowntree, 1902 ‘all bore some mark of the hard conditions against which they were struggling. Puny and feeble bodies, dirty and often sadly insufficient clothing, sore eyes, … filthy heads, cases of hip disease, swollen glands – all these and other signs told the same tale of privation and neglect’

Rowntree: mortality Mortality of Children Under 5 years of Age Area 1 poorest13.96 per annum (per 1,000 pop) Area 2 middle10.50 Area 3 highest6.00 Whole of York 7.37

Height and weight differences in relation to poverty (anthropometric approaches) Boys weights PoorestMiddle Highest Age 538 ½40 ¼44 Age ¼ Combined Average 3-13 years52 ½55 ¼58 Rowntree, Poverty, p.212.

Physical condition Very good = markedly healthy, well developed Good = average physical condition Fair = scarcely up to average standard Bad = physical traces of under-feeding and neglect Girls V good Good FairBad Poorest Middle Highest Rowntree, Poverty, p.214.

Height and Weight of 13-year olds Manchester 1913 AVERAGE HEIGHT AVERAGE WEIGHT Girls in poor class school4” 6’75lb Girls in medium class school4” 6’77lb Girls in good class school 4” 9’83lb Boys in poor class school4” 4’70lb Boys in middle class school4” 6’73 ¾lb Boys in good class school4” 9’82lb Lancet, 17 Jan

Great Ormond Street Hospital (1853 established)

Great Ormond Street

Children’s hospitals 1869 Great Ormond Street, London 75 beds and treating 720 in-patients and 15,000 out-patients (Dr Charles West) Evelina Hospital, London opened 1869 with 30 beds East London Hospital for Sick Children opened late 1860s – by beds and treating over 30,000 patients a year British Paediatric Association set up 1928 George Frederick Still, Professor Paediatrics King’s College London

Conclusions Increasing concern with health and wellbeing of child from late 19 th century onwards Reassessment of value of child – dovetailing of national, social and cultural attention and re- evaluation Rise of paediatrics from 2 nd half of 19 th century as distinct speciality (late compared with other medical specialisms) Shift from 19 th -century concern with bodily health of child to mental wellbeing of the child in the 20th century