Children's Illness and Paediatrics in England, 1550-1700. (360G-Wellcome-080643_Z_06_Z)

My PhD thesis will be concerned with sick children in England, 1550 to 1700. The chief objectives are fourfold: firstly, to uncover the emotional and physical experiences of the ill child; secondly, to ask whether there existed a concept of 'paediatrics' among parents and physicians - were children thought to require special, separate medical care and treatment that was different for adults? Thirdly, it seeks to evince the emotional response of parents to their sick children; fourthly, and finally, to ascertain whether the prescriptive advice in medical texts was followed in practice. My primary sources will include: personal documents (diaries, correspondence, and autobiographies), medical textbooks, doctors' casebooks, and domestic recipe and account books; these sources will be obtained from the online database Early English Books Online, and from the British and Wellcome libraries. The term 'child' will encompass all human beings from birth to about twenty-one years; the thesis will be subdivided into sections based on different age-ranges. Early modern learned medicine identified stages of childhood, including infanthood (0-7), childhood (7-14) and adolescence (14-21); each age-bracket was vulnerable to specific diseases (Still, 1931). This approximate division explains my decision to interpret childhood in this way.