Hannah Newton's The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580–1720 is a very good book. Contributing to the expanding scholarship on what Roy Porter most famously referred to as the “patient's view,” Newton uses personal documents (e.g., diaries, autobiographies, correspondence, and medical casebooks) and contemporary published literature to consider multiple dimensions of children's ill health during the period under consideration. Due to her extremely thorough review of both primary and secondary sources, Newton provides a nuanced and detailed discussion that is a pleasure to read. Divided into three thematic sections, which address medical perspectives, family (mainly parental) viewpoints, and the child's experience, the book's six substantive chapters illuminate learned medical ideas about the nature of children and their ailments, the arduous work and emotional strain of caring for a sick child, and children's physical and spiritual experiences of illness.
Newton creates a coherent and multidimensional view of the health culture in which early modern English children suffered and died. She argues that the dominant traditional medical theory of the time, Galenic humoralism, was actually, for the most part, compatible with, rather than polarized from, newer iatrochemical ideas. Both approaches viewed childhood as essentially different from adulthood but adapted therapeutic approaches used with adults to the special and diverse needs of children. Furthermore, Newton observes a health culture that was shared between learned practitioners and laypeople, where parents of all social classes both employed do-it-yourself treatments and shopped around among the wide range of healers comprising the early modern English medical marketplace. She argues that both mothers and fathers were intimately involved in caring for sick children, with fathers being more active in caregiving than previous scholars have observed. In addition, she agrees with other experts that, despite the heartbreaking frequency of serious illness and death among children during the period, early modern parents were extremely attached to their little ones, upset by their suffering, and terribly grieved by their deaths. She also observes that children undoubtedly loved and depended on their parents. Everywhere in Newton's discussion is the centrality of (mainly Protestant) religious beliefs and practices; providential views flavored the experiences of pain and care, death and loss. Spiritual factors also color what is, perhaps, the most controversial argument in this book: that sickness was not an unalloyed negative in early modern children's lives but could support unusual power dynamics or spiritual ecstasy favoring the child.
The greatest strength of this study is its illumination of early modern English people's emotions. Newton reads beyond the conventional sense of reported speech, linking a parent's account of a deathbed scene, for example, with other elements of that family's experience and the religious beliefs of the day. She is also not content with a knee-jerk or superficial discussion of an issue; instead, she examines multiple aspects of it, providing rich and deep analysis. Thus, for example, instead of stopping with the presentation of evidence that illness could have a spiritual benefit for early modern children, she goes on to discuss the other kinds of benefits it could offer.
From my perspective, the book's shortcomings relate to the more practical nuts-and-bolts aspects of children's sickness and care in the period under consideration. There is really no significant discussion of the types of ailments children suffered, despite the fact that disorders and symptoms were frequently mentioned in diaries, autobiographies, casebooks, letters, and bills of mortality, and were strongly linked with therapeutic approaches and decisions regarding consultation of a medical practitioner. Furthermore, when children survived the initial onset and acute phase of sickness, they were often permanently affected or ailing for a long time; thus, illness was linked to disability. In addition, some ailments were more dangerous than others—both in perception (e.g., plague and smallpox) and in reality. There also were diseases that were more common among children (e.g., smallpox, rickets, and chin cough) than among adults: yet, in contrast to more recent experience, “childhood disorders” were not necessarily considered less dangerous than other ailments. How did diagnosis affect treatment, prognosis, parental fears, and the child's own perception that she or he was in danger of dying?
Despite these issues and questions, The Sick Child is a wonderful read and a valuable contribution to the histories of medicine, childhood, and daily life in early modern England.
