Refiguring Childhood: Encounters With Biosocial Power by Kevin Ryan

Author:Kevin Ryan [Ryan, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526148612
Google: z05uzQEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 53275847
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2020-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

The strategy of hygiene

One of the major disagreements shaping the discourse of public health at the turn of the twentieth century concerned the meaning of prevention, which could be operationalised in the form of environmental measures such as the improvement of housing, sewerage and drinking water, but also in the form of eugenic interventions to prevent the birth of children who – according to the science – would grow into ‘degenerate’ and ‘defective’ adults. For contextual reasons examined by Greta Jones (1992), eugenics failed to gain any real traction in Ireland, which makes it an interesting case, because even in the absence of explicitly eugenic policies and practices, eugenics still played a part in shaping the strategy of public hygiene. At the 1911 Congress of the Royal Institute of Public Health for example, held that year in Dublin, the section devoted to Child Study and Eugenics examined ways to ‘encourage the breeding of the fit, and discourage the breeding of the unfit’ (Freeman's Journal 1911b: 5, see also Freeman's Journal 1911a, 1911c; Irish Independent 1911a, 1911b).4 Eugenicists and environmental hygienists sometimes met as antagonists, but the strategies were by no means mutually exclusive, and they aligned on the terrain of ‘infant life protection’. This was a field of discourse shaped initially by concerns over ‘baby farming’ and infanticide, and it was codified by a series of legal reforms that commenced in 1872 and culminated in the Children Act of 1908 (more on this below). Moreover, it also gained traction through the emerging science of childhood.

As noted in chapter 2, the British Child Study Association, led by James Sully, was established in 1894 (Cunningham 1991: 198). Though the organisation's influence had already waned by the start of the First World War, it paved the way for professionally trained psychologists to lay claim to a science of childhood and education, and part of what made this possible was the idea of racial ‘degeneration’ or, in the case of Britain, ‘national deterioration’ (see Pick 1989). This framed the relation between animal/human, savage/civilised as a battle staged on the terrain of evolution – between the ‘fit’ and those deemed to be physically, intellectually and morally ‘defective’. We have already seen how this was influenced by Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law (whereby ontogeny is seen to recapitulate phylogeny), such that the Child Study Association experts believed that human evolution was recapitulated by the child, and that this afforded the means of scientifically ascertaining the ‘raw material or morality’. In terms of how this has a bearing on the school hygiene activists, their core concern was fully in step with Sully's claim that the ‘wild untamed nature’ of the child could be ‘subdued’ by education – but only if the child was educable (Sully 1903: 8, 325). Hence what was required was a means of sifting and separating the educable from the rest.

The technique of school medical inspection was on the ascendency at this time, establishing a practice which was also a codified procedure to be applied in identifying defective children.

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