Infant life Protection and Medico-Legal Literacy in Early Twentieth-century Dublin

At the turn of the twentieth century, the infant mortality rate in Dublin city was higher than that of London, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Political concerns about the health of nations coupled with the work of child protection campaigners gave rise to a sense of panic across the Anglophone world and caused an increase in the surveillance of the body of the child. While a combination of poor sanitation and inadequate feeding could account for the majority of deaths, single motherhood and the fringes of childcare were treated as flashpoints by local authorities, police and philanthropists, as well as religious, medical and legal personnel alike. Sensationalised newspaper reports played a crucial part in raising public awareness about the infant crisis, and it is for such reasons that this article focuses on the extraordinary case of Mrs Sarah T., who was accused of what was colloquially known as ‘baby-farming’ in Dublin in 1905. The case is used as a prism to examine how the infant life protection campaign contributed to the shaping of ‘medico-legal literacy’ in Ireland. The article focuses on post neonatal infants, aged over one month, to question the degree to which lower socio-economic circumstances precipitated excess mortality or if Church/State encroachment on family life and parental rights exposed already vulnerable infants to more pernicious risks associated with micro-epidemics, particularly in relation to tuberculosis

Child protection · Literacy · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Public health · Sanitation · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Homicide, Infanticide, and Child Abuse · Law · Medicine · Nursing

• Interrogating institutionalisation and child welfare

  Sarah-Anne Buckley, Caroline Mc Gregor•European Journal of Social Work•2018

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