Growing Pains: Childhood Illness in Ireland 1750-1950

Despite the immense interest sparked by recent child abuse and orphan vaccination trials, the history of childhood illness in Ireland has remained largely hidden. Spanning two centuries, Growing Pains is the first history of Ireland’s unique social, cultural, and political responses to safeguarding childhood health and treating physically, psychologically, and socially vulnerable children. The book also investigates medical management in the home, hospitals, reformatories, industrial schools, and workhouses - places where treatments ranged from the unorthodox to the experimental. Growing Pains provides an account of infectious and non-infectious diseases, such as rickets, smallpox, tuberculosis, Spanish flu, epilepsy, and opthalmia, and it explores community and institutional responses to these illnesses across the centuries, as well as describing the medical pioneers who fought for better treatment and condition for Ireland’s children. *** This is the first collection to deal with the history of childhood illness in Ireland and is thus groundbreaking in its extent and concerns….The collection is coherent, is well edited, and adds considerably to our knowledge of Irish social and medical history. It is a very welcome addition to the history of children in Ireland and reveals how changing concepts of childhood illness informed attitudes to children, and shaped understandings of childhood itself. - Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 89, No. 1, Spring 2015 [Subject: History, Irish Studies, Health, History of Medicine]A?A?A?A?