From Stunted Child to 'New Woman': The Significance of Physical Growth in Late-Nineteenth-Century Medicine and Fiction

Abstract

`Growing! Why, growing is getting bigger, of course', answers the `unthinking child' to Mrs Barnett's question, `What is growing?'. (1) And, of course, there is a kind of sense to this answer, though the child involved is given rather short shrift by his formidable interlocutor, and is subsequently treated to educative examples of adding extra rice to a rice pudding to get a bigger one, or sewing bits of calico together to the same end. But this unthinking child was being faced with a question that puzzled neurologists and physicians of his day. I want to suggest here that understandings of what growth was, and why it was important, became much more problematic in the 1890s than they had been only twenty years earlier. Children, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, as James Sully humorously pointed out, had become the object of scientific scrutiny, as `the tiny occupant of the cradle has had to bear the piercing glance of the scientific eye' (p. 545). As Jenny Bourne Taylor has suggested, late-nineteenth-century scientific and psychological thought began to focus on the child as a `growing consciousness', which provided a `powerful and poignant embodiment of the idea of both human interiority and collective development'. (2) The concern of my own essay is growth, particularly neurological growth, but its focus is different from Bourne Taylor's, for I shall be exploring the significance of growth in its own right, and the arguments about developmental fixity and fluidity that grew from late-nineteenth-century understandings of what this process involved. Victor Horsley's 1890 discovery that if you injected or fed children stunted in their development by cretinism with the thyroid of a sheep they would grow and develop epitomizes a radical change in perception. Dickens had been overwhelmed, much earlier in the century, by Guggenbuhl's ability to transform sufferers from `sporadic cretinism', `stunted withered skeletons' deemed to be idiots, into children heading `rapidly towards perfect development'. (3) To do this he simply moved them from the deep shadow of alpine valleys into the sunlight at the summit of the Abendberg, and in so doing recognized the significance of environment to the ability of a child to grow. Dickens's amazement was justified, but he was not being asked to respond to anything he was not already seeing at home. Stunted children abounded in the slums of Victorian England, and their lack of growth became intimately related to over-work, to poor nutrition, and to their environment. What changed at the beginning of the 1890s was the sense that some `developmental power' was at work in promoting growth. (4) As Henry Herbert Donaldson was to declare, in a rather bewildered way, in his book on The Growth of the Brain, published five years after Horsley's discovery: In cases of `sporadic cretinism'--arrested bodily and mental development, associated with the atrophy of the thyroid gland--thyroid-feeding has produced in some instances a remarkable increase in stature together with corresponding mental improvement. Under such treatment a boy of nine years grew four and one quarter inches in height in eight months, and at the same time showed mental improvement. [...] The thyroid-feeding appears to supply some substance needed for growth, but lacking in those individuals. (5) What this `substance needed for growth' is, Donaldson and his contemporaries, or at least those who were looking for it, had no idea, but it is this sense of something internal and yet unknown, that marks out the last decade of the nineteenth century. Conflicting frames of reference, that had grown up much earlier in the century, surrounding the idea of the growing child, or rather the child who failed to grow, are made evident in the terminological approaches to the subject that obtained. On the one hand were the advocates of `stunted growth', those who, like Guggenbuhl, saw the effects of an adverse environment holding back the developmental processes within the child. …