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  • Introduction
  • Martha Saxton (bio)

Lauren Winner, writing on eighteenth-century America, introduces this issue's object lesson: an elegant, silver baptismal bowl from Virginia that also doubled as a vessel for cooling wine glasses. Professor Winner helps us understand how an object that was designed to welcome children to this life and to insure their entry into a better one could also double as an aid to that most secular of pursuits, drinking wine, and what that suggests about the role of children and the centrality of the family in eighteenth-century gentry life.

If a discussion of a religious welcome to life introduces this volume, the title of Diana Pasulka's essay, "A Somber Pedagogy," might be an apt title for this issue of the Journal of the History Childhood and Youth that deals with questions about children's illness and death. Professor Pasulka's research traces the theme of child death from English and American Puritan writing through to the English-language novels of the nineteenth century. Professor Pasulka demonstrates important thematic similarities among treatments of child-death over three hundred years, culminating in the nineteenth-century with still-famous scenes like the demise of Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Pasulka's work illustrates the literary and religious uses of these representations of children in periods of consistently high mortality but changing social and religious conventions.

The other essays in this number focus on the early twentieth century, as scholars of Europe, Australia, and the United States reflect on the ways in which reformers reacted to widespread disease and child mortality at a time when industrialization and urbanization were challenging the terms of the traditional social contract that bound citizens and their governments. In this crucible, social workers and medical experts re-imagined the state's responsibilities to children, putting into practice their expertise, their philanthropic impulses, as well as their desires for order and, sometimes, hierarchy as well.

Three linked essays discuss the development of seaside hospitals at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, Sweden, and Belgium. Separately, the authors give us fascinating pictures of differing national responses to the [End Page 159] plague of tuberculosis among children. Together, these sometimes overlapping and sometimes contrasting portraits of what differing national experts believed constituted proper treatment and a salubrious environment for afflicted children offer a comparative perspective on international Progressive-Era thinking. Underneath the health concerns in each country lay deeper moral and social concerns about the conditions that reformers believed promoted the spread of tuberculosis: urbanization, industrialization, and the presumably deficient habits and morals of the poor. While reformers and medical authorities all believed that fresh air and sea breezes would invigorate the bodies of sick children, some, as we see in the Swedish example, also believed in more drastic surgical methods to control nonpulmonary tuberculosis. Most also believed in isolating the sick from what they considered unhealthy environments and influences, which might include their familiar neighborhoods, their customary food, their schools, and their families. These essays give us a measure of reformers' complex motives both here and in Western Europe, desiring both to aid and also to "reform" the culture of the poor. Additionally, they provide a unique, comparative insight into the relationship between medical advances (or perceived advances) and the larger project of greater state intervention into the lives of its citizens.

Working in the same period and with similar themes, Shurlee Swain looks at the ideas British reformers had about the lives that poor children should live by studying their responses to infant mortality. In her account of the thought of child-savers, Swain uncovers their constricted and biased views about the possibilities for the childhoods of the children they hoped to "save."

In our final essay, Lisa Wexler takes up the grim theme of youth suicide and identifies knowledge of history as a preventive measure. Wexler has done research among the Inupiaq in northwestern Alaska that has informed her discussion of the conditions and kind of education that Native American young people need to avoid the physical and emotional health stresses that can accompany life on a reservation. She finds that a strong sense of ethnic identity...

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