Constructing the Infant Body: The Intervention of the Educated, Male Physician in Eighteenth-Century Infant Diet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on medical advice literature, this paper examines the cultural history of the body in infancy in eighteenth-century England. This period saw the increasing professionalization of the medical field, particularly regarding children’s health, as an emerging profession of educated, male physicians sought to establish their exclusive authority on the medical market. As England’s medical market of the time was largely unregulated, these educated physicians competed with apothecaries, midwives, and female nurses for paying customers. Physicians argued that the disorderly, undisciplined nature of the infant body was incongruent with Enlightenment virtues, and therefore required a greater degree of medical management. Emerging out of this discourse were popular advice books which emphasized preventative measures in already-healthy infant patients. They were authored by a growing profession of educated, medical experts and were addressed to a lay audience of parents and child caretakers. This paper examines three immensely popular pamphlets authored by three physicians, Thomas Beddoes, George Armstrong, and William Cadogan. All three emphasized in their tracts the importance of maternal breastfeeding to the infant diet, citing Enlightenment ideals, humoral theory, and even the supernatural elements of breastmilk to support this claim. To bring the child body firmly under the control of the medical establishment, they argued that uneducated, lay practitioners, who were overwhelmingly female, received no formal education in the sciences and thus possessed little understanding of the nuances and complexities specific to the infant body. Parents were also incapable and deficient, at least to some degree, in the formal knowledge necessary to prevent illness in their infant children, and thus should rely on the physician’s expertise regarding the care of the infant body.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".