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

Abstract

This paper explores the significance of physical growth to late-nineteenth-century medicine and literature. Important changes in the way that growth was understood came about after the discovery, in 1890, that feeding sheep's thyroid to children suffering from cretinism made them grow and develop. What emerges in the 1890s is the sense that children were not unalterably stunted by their surroundings or degeneratively arrested in their growth, but that the development of their nervous system, and their subsequent increase in size, was possible. Using Sarah Grand's "The Beth Book" (1897) as an example, this paper shows the way in which New Woman novelists used the emergent rhetoric of growth to propel their own demands to be allowed intellectual freedom and development of their own.