Events

Joint EGENIS/Wellcome Centre seminar: "Constructing Moral and Proto-Scientific Babies: The Medical and Scientific Enterprise of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century America", Dr Elisabeth Yang (University of Leeds)

Egenis seminar series

Babies continue to befuddle us, in our everyday interactions with and our scientific investigations of them. Their interior lives-moral and Spiritual-in particular, have increasingly intrigued modern society. This is reflected in the emergence of So Called "baby Labs" in universities to playgrounds, creches, and home nurseries in North America and Europe While historians have typically viewed the emergence of infant study and paediatrics from a physiological perspective, my research has uncovered complex debates within medical and scientific communities concerning the moral and spiritual aspects of infants, particularly how infants' moral and spiritual agency can be understood and directed.

Event details

Constructing Moral Babies: The Medical and Scientific Enterprise of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century America contributes to existing scholarship by rethinking the entanglement of the moral, spiritual, and scientific in infant health, and science, showing how experts from and beyond the medical and scientific communities in nineteenth-century America understood infants as moral agents and beings. This project addresses fundamental questions regarding how late modern Americans believed morality to be a religious, philosophical, and arguably, physiological phenomenon especially as it concerned infants and their ontologies. This research sheds light on an Era of Proto-Scientific Babies, a historical moment preceding the Enterprise of Constructing ‘Happy and Healthy Babies’—an endeavour that would demand the attention and efforts of experts, officials and middle-class mothers at the turn of the century. 

Venue: Byrne House, Streatham Campus (numbers limited)

Virtual: via Zoom

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