Das „gesunde Arbeiterkind“ als ein Projekt der „Sozialen Medizin“. Zur wissenschaftlichen Neuordnung der Kindheit durch die Medikalisierung der „Sozialen Frage“ zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts

Abstract

In this paper I will explore the competitions in the scientific field in respect to the identification and solution of the problems posed in the course of the “Social Question” in Austria at the beginning of the 20th century. I will outline the suggestions inherent for the proper handlingof working class parents and children in these scientific discourses. Particularly I will analyse the influence of national-economic thinking on the medical discourse and show, how “SocialMedicine” as a result demanded a health policy for the working class. The improvement of medical care, housing and labour conditions were argued to be the prerequisites for economic progress in the international industrial competition. Therefore a healthy proletariat in healthy family situations should be successfully deployable as “organic machine”. The latter should be reached guided by the general principles of the contemporary bourgeois-patriarchal family by a “domestication of maternity” and by a “double location of childhood” in the family and in school. This new “Order of Childhood” was positioned against the way of life of the working and lower classes and their children were normalized and regularized by the new professions of childhood in the field of medicine, psychology and pedagogy for the public benefit of the “future of society”.