Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the contributors
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: constructing international health between the wars
- 2 ‘Custodians of the sacred fire’: the ICRC and the postwar reorganisation of the International Red Cross
- 3 Red Cross organisational politics, 1918–1922: relations of dominance and the influence of the United States
- 4 The League of Nations Health Organisation
- 5 Assistance and not mere relief: the Epidemic Commission of the League of Nations, 1920–1923
- 6 Wireless wars in the eastern arena: epidemiological surveillance, disease prevention and the work of the Eastern Bureau of the League of Nations Health Organisation, 1925–1942
- 7 Social medicine at the League of Nations Health Organisation and the International Labour Office compared
- 8 The Social Section and Advisory Committee on Social Questions of the League of Nations
- 9 ‘Uncramping child life’: international children's organisations, 1914–1939
- 10 The International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation: the Russell years, 1920–1934
- 11 The cycles of eradication: the Rockefeller Foundation and Latin American public health, 1918–1940
- 12 The Pasteur Institutes between the two world wars. The transformation of the international sanitary order
- 13 Internationalising nursing education during the interwar period
- 14 Mental hygiene as an international movement
- 15 Mobilising social knowledge for social welfare: intermediary institutions in the political systems of the United States and Great Britain between the First and Second World Wars
- Index
- Cambridge History of Medicine
9 - ‘Uncramping child life’: international children's organisations, 1914–1939
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the contributors
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: constructing international health between the wars
- 2 ‘Custodians of the sacred fire’: the ICRC and the postwar reorganisation of the International Red Cross
- 3 Red Cross organisational politics, 1918–1922: relations of dominance and the influence of the United States
- 4 The League of Nations Health Organisation
- 5 Assistance and not mere relief: the Epidemic Commission of the League of Nations, 1920–1923
- 6 Wireless wars in the eastern arena: epidemiological surveillance, disease prevention and the work of the Eastern Bureau of the League of Nations Health Organisation, 1925–1942
- 7 Social medicine at the League of Nations Health Organisation and the International Labour Office compared
- 8 The Social Section and Advisory Committee on Social Questions of the League of Nations
- 9 ‘Uncramping child life’: international children's organisations, 1914–1939
- 10 The International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation: the Russell years, 1920–1934
- 11 The cycles of eradication: the Rockefeller Foundation and Latin American public health, 1918–1940
- 12 The Pasteur Institutes between the two world wars. The transformation of the international sanitary order
- 13 Internationalising nursing education during the interwar period
- 14 Mental hygiene as an international movement
- 15 Mobilising social knowledge for social welfare: intermediary institutions in the political systems of the United States and Great Britain between the First and Second World Wars
- Index
- Cambridge History of Medicine
Summary
The normal child is the most valuable member of the community, and whereas welfare work flourishes in most countries, and has everywhere aroused popular imagination and generosity, there remain the great questions of education and training, mental and moral, of the young … We want to protect and develop the normal child as well as the abnormal, weakly, or poverty stricken … We may point out that many women's organizations considered and passed in 1922 a children's charter setting forth the right of every child to have opportunities of full development.
(The Times, 5 February 1925)Developing a discourse
The present preoccupation with child abuse and the discussion on the best means of protecting child life merely elaborate a rhetoric whose antecedents are in the nineteenth-century child-saving movement which flourished in industrialised nations. A study of international child protection organisations illustrates the continuity of such rhetoric which moved from a sentimental depiction of victims to a medico-social scientific discourse of children at risk that expanded the concepts of victimisation, exploitation and abuse.
It is through discourse that social claims become persuasively defined and social conditions are identified and transformed into social problems whose advocates lobby for recognition of the priority of their claims.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918–1939 , pp. 176 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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