From Cradle to Grave (HI278) Lecture 3
Child Poverty, Health and the State

• Changing ideas and experiences of childhood in the 20 th century.
• Value of children/childhood.
• The family, children and the state.
• Children, poverty and sickness/
• Children’s medicine.

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

• Value to state (national efficiency) – future citizens.
• 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)

New institutions and laws to protect children
• The London Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children
(1 884) – became the NSPCC.
• Prevention of Cruelty to Children
Act (1889)
• Education Act (1907)

Family, Children, State: a Changing Relationship
• C19th (until c.1870) – social provision locally financed and administered (Poor Law)
• Voluntary sector i.e. Charity – vital role well into C20th – most efforts directed at welfare of family
• With mixed economy of welfare came rise of state provision e.g. NI 1911, NHS 1948

B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: A
Study of Town Life (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’

Height and weight differences
Boys weights
Age 5
Poorest
38 ½
Age 13 73
Combined
Average
3-13 years 52 ½
Rowntree, Poverty, p.212.
Middle
40 ¼
80
55 ¼
Highest
44
84 ¼
58

• Lack of sunlight, vitamin D

Height and Weight of 13-year olds
Manchester 1913
• Girls in good class school
Average Height
• Girls in poor class school 4” 6’
• Girls in medium class school 4” 6’
4” 9’
Average Weight
75lb
77lb
83lb
• Boys in poor class school
• Boys in middle class school
• Boys in good class school
4” 4’
4” 6’
4” 9’
70lb
73 ¾lb
82lb
Lancet, 17 Jan. 1914.

Great Ormond Street Hospital
(est.1853)

• 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 1895 102 beds and treating over
30,000 patients a year
• British Paediatric Association set up 1928

• 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 reevaluation
• 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