Childhood, Pain and Emotion: A British Modern Medical History demonstrates that the history of childhood pain involves three complex problems: the conceptualisation of pain, the lack of scientific unity and the ‘politics of pain’. Manuscript sources, such as hospital records, case notes and medical texts, along with printed sources and non-textual materials like photography, have been mobilised to investigate a subject that has never before been the exclusive focus of historical analysis. The book reveals how diverse professional rivalries and cultural contexts shaped the treatment and understanding of children’s pain. It emphasises the need to reassess historical and contemporary perspectives on childhood pain and its broader social implications.

Chapter 3 goes back in time to cover the second half of the nineteenth century with regards to the issue of children’s insanity and mental suffering. The notion of the child mind and the debates surrounding its understanding and relation with the body are explored through a series of representative diseases, including ‘night terrors’, melancholia, hysteria and monomania. The limitations of the anatomo-clinical method are discussed in relation with the work of leading psychiatrists and neurologists, including James-Crichton Browne and Henry Maudsley.

Anchored in the theoretical perspectives explored in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 surveys the historical development of infant pain denial from 1890 until 1950 in three scientific communities: the child study movement, behavioural psychology and paediatrics. The analysis shows the extent to which figurations of children’s pain were products of a struggle for recognition between contending disciplines and delves into the reasons for the scepticism towards pain, which had important consequences in paediatrics.

Chapter 5 examines the complex debates around the evacuation policies conducted in the United Kingdom before and during the Second World War. The discourses and figurations of children’s pain that were used to legitimise public policies are compared with the social results of those policies and contrasted with the ways in which different medical communities analysed the figure of the evacuated child: as a victim of air raids or as a victim of parental separation. The momentum of psychoanalysis as the predominant framework to understand psychological trauma is examined in this context, looking closely at the work and research of prominent figures such as Anna Freud and Melanie Klein.

The Introduction provides an overview of the central questions raised in the book, the arguments presented, and the methodology employed. It frames key questions about the shifting meanings of childhood pain and its implications for the construction of adult worlds. Additionally, it highlights the interplay between the child as an object of clinical observation and as a symbolic figure within cultural and scientific narratives. Through this lens, it contributes to broader debates on the intersections of science, emotion, and society. The methodology used is one of interdisciplinary history, drawn largely from the history of medicine and cultural history, which assesses visual as well as written material.

Chapter 1 examines the interpretations of children’s language of pain, particularly screams and cries, by different professional bodies between 1870 and 1900. The chapter connects Charles Darwin’s evolutionist perspective inaugurated in ‘A Biographical Sketch of an Infant’ with the theoretical curiosity that informed embryologists’ and psychologists’ instrumental approach to pain, contrasting this with the practical paediatric challenge of understanding children to diagnose and treat them. This chapter also considers the photographic representations of sick children used for fundraising by the Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Chapter 4 continues the theme of the preceding chapter in chronological order and seeks to expose the contrast between two coexisting theoretical frameworks: the clinical tradition, which still argued for the somatic basis of mental illnesses, and the emerging field of psychotherapy. The second part of the chapter examines the figuration of the ‘nervous child’, which recognised the importance of the environment in mental health.