Felix Rietmann
Raising a Well-Grown Child: Material and Media Cultures of Child Health in the Early Nineteenth Century
Université Fribourg
Historien de la médecine
Résumé
During the 19th century children moved into the focus of a blossoming material and media culture. A growing market of parent advice literature offered information on topics ranging from nutrition to moral education. An increasingly broad range of toys and educational devices, such as baby walkers and writing helps, sought to assist and discipline the child during learning. The nascent specialty of pediatrics was deeply embedded and participated in this culture. Medical practitioners wrote advice, developed medical tinctures, and patented devices for healthy growth and upbringing. The project investigates how these new material, media, and medical cultures of childhood produced ideas and discourses about health and illness, and normal and pathological development. It explores how childhood was discovered as a subject for health care in the public sphere and inquires into the cultural and medical meanings that have thus become attached to it.
Seeing the Infant: Audiovisual Technologies and the Rise of Infant Mental Health
Université Fribourg
Historien de la médecine
Résumé
My book project, Seeing the Infant,explores epistemic, social, and cultural dimensions of the use of audiovisual technologies in infant psychology and psychiatry in the USA and Western Europe from the mid-twentieth to the present. It investigates how scientific and medical practitioners employed cinematography, video, computational assessment methods, and digital interfaces to analyze the psychology of young children, diagnose normal and pathological development in infants, and treat relationship problems within families. The study engages with the increasing presence of old and new media in laboratories and clinics, and asks about both the limits these media pose and the opportunities they offer to science and medicine. Partly, it uses infant research as a case study of broader media-historical changes and sheds light on the historical backgrounds and potential implications of, by now, quotidian scientific and clinical tools. But the project is also an inquiry into a specific field of medical and scientific expertise. It investigates the emergence of the recent sub-specialty of infant mental health and not only explores how this multi-disciplinary field shaped and was shaped by audiovisual technologies but also how both the discipline and the technologies have contributed to the ways we conceptualize, treat, and educate families and children today.
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CHUV
Av. de Provence 82
CH-1007 Lausanne
+41 21 314 7050
CHUV
Av. de Provence 82
CH-1007 Lausanne
+41 21 314 7050