The First English Pediatricians and Tudor Attitudes Toward Childhood

Abstract

In his history of changing French attitudes toward children, Phillippe Aries poses a demographic puzzle: infant mortality (and with it the psychological danger of becoming too interested in or attached to children) remained constantly high during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Under such conditions, parents develop a somewhat cool, detached, and at times slightly suspicious attitude toward children, looking upon them as miniature adults because only when they become adults will the dangers of losing them diminish. Yet in France there arose an astonishing new interest in children in their own right as non-adults, beginning in the late fifteenth but centering in the seventeenth century.' In England, much the same new interest appeared in the sixteenth century, particularly as a part of the important innovations of humanist educators and Puritan theologians. The question which arises, then, is why the most innovative men of that period, who differed in many other ways, showed a remarkably similar, new concern for children which cannot be explained demographically. The answer, I wish to suggest, may be found through an analysis of the first two books on pediatrics written in English, Thomas Phaire's collection of recipes, The Boke of Chyldren (1544) and John Jones's more theoretical and wide-ranging The A rte and Science ofpreseruing Bodie and Soule in all healthe, Wisedome, and Catholike Religion (1579). Jones particularly, and Phaire to a lesser extent, articulate a paranoid vision of the world which resonates with the utopian and apocalyptic thought of the period. Glimpses of the end of the world mesh in their writings with fears of personal physical disintegration; the latter are projected onto a society objectively in turmoil. The world's body, as