Anomalous Bodies: Representations of Deformities in Children in Britain, 1740-1790
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My dissertation examines the representation of anomalous bodies of children in 18th century Britain. Using the category of ‘deformity’, defined during this period as a lack of virtue, ugliness, and irregularity of the body, it considers how the 18th century child is represented in each of these areas. I argue that the bodies of children participate in the construction of the defective body as defined in the 18th century, but that this participation does not always conform to the dominant historical narrative that children are seen as medically unique from adults. Using a wide range of sources, including archival materials and published texts from different genres that present the physically anomalous child in different arenas, including the prescriptive literature, child labour, physical growth, and anatomy, I show that perceptions of, responses to, and the understanding of their physical differences was influenced by the cultural and medical worlds of the period. Children, I show, were special and the knowledge gained from observing them contributed to information about the broader adult world they inhabited and not just the world of children. My thesis lies at the intersection of the history of childhood, medicine, and disability. Through my analysis of the prescriptive literature that constructed the “ideal” child as free of or cured of their deformity, the dual representation of childhood in chimney sweeps in texts and images, the numerical gauging of irregular growth in children, and the use of child and foetal cadavers in anatomical pursuits, I show the defective body of the child calls into question the strengthening boundaries that separate the child from the adult during the 18th century and suggest the history of children’s medicine requires a more nuanced approach. The defective body of the child, therefore, brings into focus the nature of the connection between the worlds of children and adults during the 18th century.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".