1 There is a considerable body of scholarship on various aspects of this transformation, although few works explicitly engage with histories of knowledge about childhood. On the child study movements in the USA and Europe see von Oertzen, Christine, ‘Science in the cradle: Milicent Shinn and her home-based network of baby observers, 1890–1910’, Centaurus (2013) 55, pp. 175–195 Google Scholar; Shuttleworth, Sally, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 Google Scholar; Smuts, A.B., Science in the Service of Children, 1893–1935, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006 Google Scholar; Daepe, Marc, Zum Wohl des Kindes? Pädologie, pädagogische Psychologie und experimentelle Pädagogik in Europa und den USA, 1890–1940, Weinheim: Leuven University Press, 1993 Google Scholar. On drawings and toy usage see Wittmann, Barbara, ‘Bedeutungsvolle Kritzeleien: Die Kinderzeichnung als Instrument der Humanwissenschaften, 1880–1950’, unpublished Habilitation, Bauhaus University, 2012 Google Scholar; Douglas, Mao, Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature, 1860–1960, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008 Google Scholar; Brown, Marilyn R. (ed.), Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood between Rousseau and Freud, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002 Google Scholar. On ergonomics, physiology and (reform) pedagogics see Whittaker, Gwendolyn, Überbürdung – Subversion – Ermächtigung: Die Schule und die literarische Moderne 1880–1918, Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2013 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hopf, Caroline, Die experimentelle Pädagogik: Empirische Erziehungswissenschaft in Deutschland am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts, Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhart, 2004 Google Scholar; Oelkers, Jürgen, ‘Physiologie, Pädagogik und Schulreform im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Sarasin, Philipp and Tanner, Jakob (eds.), Physiologie und industrielle Gesellschaft: Studien zur Verwissenschaftlichung des Körpers im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998, pp. 245–285 Google Scholar; Meumann, Ernst, Vorlesungen zur Einführungen in die experimentelle Pädagogik und ihre psychologischen Grundlagen, Leipzig: Engelmann, 1907 Google Scholar. For a sociologically informed perspective see Gutman, Marta and de Coninck-Smith, Ning (eds.), Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space and the Material Culture of Childhood, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008 Google Scholar.

2 Foerster, Friedrich Wilhelm, Staatsbürgerliche Erziehung: Prinzipienfragen politischer Ethik und politischer Pädagogik, Leipzig: Teubner, 1914 Google Scholar. See e.g. Giuriato, Davide, ‘Tintenbuben: Kindheit und Literatur um 1900 (Rilke, R. Walser, Benjamin)’, Poetica (2010) 42, pp. 325–351 Google Scholar; Bernstein, Robin, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, New York: New York University Press, 2011 Google Scholar; Wittmann, op. cit. (1).

3 Cf. Renn, Jürgen, ‘From the history of science to the history of knowledge – and back’, Centaurus (2015) 57, pp. 37–53 Google Scholar. In literature studies, poetologies of knowledge similarly understand literature as a form of knowledge conditioned by and contributing to larger cultural discourses, including the human and the natural sciences. Cf. Vogl, Joseph, ‘Poetologie des Wissens’, in Maye, Harun and Scholz, Leander (eds.), Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft, Munich: Fink, 2011, pp. 49–71 Google Scholar.

4 For modified published versions of the conference papers see Cook, Daniel Thomas, ‘Moral order and moral ordering in public advice about American children's rooms, 1876–1909’, Strenæ (online journal) (2014) 7, published 1 June 2014 Google Scholar; Arni, Caroline, ‘Traversing birth: continuity and contingency in research on development in nineteenth-century life and human sciences’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (2015) 37(1), pp. 50–67 Google Scholar; Giuriato, Davide, ‘Kinder retten: Biopolitik in Stifters Erzählung “Der Waldgänger”’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der Literatur (2015) 40(2), pp. 441–458 Google Scholar; Göhlsdorf, Novina, ‘Wie man aufschreibt, was sich nicht zeigt: Autismus als Widerstand und Anreiz früher kinderpsychiatrischer Aufzeichnungen’, in Bock, Cornelius and Schäfer, Armin (eds.), Das psychiatrische Aufzeichnungssystem: Notieren, Ordnen, Schreiben in der Psychiatrie, Paderborn: Fink, 2015, pp. 225–244 Google Scholar.

5 The need to find some coherence in the historical study of material culture also motivated a 2009 forum in the American Historical Review: ‘Historians and the study of material culture’. In the discussion, the editors focused on questions about the relationship between things and words, between things and humans, and between things and broader culture. The present discussion partly goes beyond these questions in considering the materiality of texts themselves and focusing on the relationship between materiality and knowledge, rather than things and texts. See Auslander, Leora, Bentley, Amy, Leor, Halevi, Otto Sibum, H. and Witmore, Christopher, ‘AHR Conversation’, American Historical Review (2009) 114, pp. 1355–1404 Google Scholar.

6 To mention one example, the Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth contains a separate section, called ‘Object lessons’, dedicated to the study of ‘material culture’. According to the editors, the section was meant to ‘foster discussion of the objects and experiences in children's lives’. See Lovett, Laura L., ‘Introduction’, Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth (2010) 3, pp. 1–3, 1Google Scholar. See also Calvert, Karin, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood 1600–1900, Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1992 Google Scholar; Gutman and Coninck-Smith, op. cit. (1).

7 Downing, Andrew Jackson, The Architecture of Country Houses, New York: Dover Publications, 1850 Google Scholar; first published 1969, opposite pp. 146, 164.

8 For an early twentieth-century example see Walter Crabtree, ‘A house built for $4500’, House & Garden, September 1907, pp. 110–111.

9 Zelizer, Viviana A., Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, New York: Basic Books, 1985, p. 12 Google Scholar; also see the special issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth on Pricing the Priceless Child: A Retrospective (2012) 5(3)Google Scholar.

10 English, Daylanne K., Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, pp. 48–49 Google Scholar; English, ‘W.E.B. Du Bois's family crisis’, American Literature (2000), 72, pp. 291–319 Google Scholar.

11 Reagan, Leslie J., When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–1973, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 Google Scholar; Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996 Google Scholar.

12 Smith, Suzanne E., To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 67–68 Google Scholar.

13 Funeral photographs are also part of a long and rich history of African American funeral practices, dating back to slave night-time ceremonies and burial aid societies. See Holloway, Karla F.C., Passed On: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002 Google Scholar; Brown, Vincent, The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008 Google Scholar.

14 Van Der Zee, James, Dodson, Owen and Billops, Camille, The Harlem Book of the Dead, New York: Morgan & Morgan, 1978, pp. 82–85 Google Scholar.

15 A comparable working-class white family in Manhattan paid $316 a year ($26 per month) for rent and earned more. See Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn, ‘Or Does It Explode?’ Black Harlem in the Great Depression, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 28 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Van Der Zee, Dodson and Billops, op. cit. (14), p. 4.

16 See the analysis of photographs of African American children during the Civil War and through Reconstruction in Mitchell, Mary Niall, Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery, New York: New York University Press, 2008 Google Scholar; also see Bernstein, op. cit. (2).

17 Mitchell, Michele, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, pp. 177–179 Google Scholar.

18 Cf. on milieu theories and the idea of ‘heredo-intoxication’ in Mendelsohn, France J. Andrew, ‘Medicine and the making of bodily inequality in twentieth-century Europe’, in Gaudillière, Jean-Paul and Löwy, Ilana (eds.), Heredity and Infection: The History of Disease Transmission, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 21–79 Google Scholar.

19 Cf. Arni, Caroline, ‘Vom Unglück des mütterlichen “Versehens” zur Biopolitik des “Pränatalen”: Aspekte einer Wissensgeschichte der maternal-fötalen Beziehung’, in Sänger, Eva and Rödel, Malaika (eds.), Biopolitik und Geschlecht: Zur Regulierung des Lebendigen, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2012, pp. 44–66 Google Scholar.

20 On the teratological research in France that Féré’s work continued and extended see Oppenheimer, Jane M., ‘Some historical relationships between teratology and experimental embryology’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1968) 42(2), pp. 145–159 Google ScholarPubMed.

21 Cf. Arni, Caroline, ‘The prenatal: contingencies of procreation and transmission in the nineteenth and early twentieth century’, in Brandt, Christina and Müller-Wille, Staffan (eds.), Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850–1930, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016, pp. 285–309 Google Scholar.

22 On Ballantyne see Al-Gailani, Salim, ‘Pregnancy, pathology and public morals: making antenatal care in Edinburgh around 1900’, in Greenlees, Janet and Bryder, Linda (eds.), Western Maternity and Medicine, 1880–1990, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013, pp. 31–46 Google Scholar. Prenatal pathology comes to full bloom nowadays in the research field called ‘developmental origins of health and disease’. Cf. Gluckmann, Peter D., Hanson, Mark A. and Buklijas, Tatjana, ‘Maternal and transgenerational influences on human health’, in Gissis, Snait and Jablonka, Eva (eds.), Transformations of Lamarckism: From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011, pp. 237–249 Google Scholar.

23 Hopwood, Nick, ‘Producing development: the anatomy of human embryos and the norms of Wilhelm His’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2000) 74, pp. 29–79 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Wellmann, Janina, The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760–1830, Cambridge: Zone Books, 2017 Google Scholar. For the intersections between embryology and evolutionary thought see the concise overview by Canguilhem, Georges, Lapassade, Georges, Piquemal, Jacques and Ulmann, Jacques, Du développement à l’évolution au XIXe siècle, Paris: PUF, 2003 Google Scholar; first published 1962; and, in great detail, Hopwood, Nick, Haeckel's Embryos: Images, Evolution and Fraud, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015 Google Scholar.

24 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Routledge, 1974, p. 219 Google Scholar; Koselleck, Reinhart, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 Google Scholar. For how this concept of time played out in concepts of ontogeny and phylogeny respectively see Owsei, Temkin, ‘German concepts of ontogeny and history around 1800’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1950) 24, pp. 227–246 Google Scholar; Bowler, Peter J., Life's a Splendid Drama: Evolutionary Biology and the Reconstruction of Life's Ancestry 1860–1940, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996 Google Scholar. For a critical discussion of the temporalization of the living see von Wülfingen, Bettina Bock, Brandt, Christina, Lettow, Susanne and Vienne, Florence (eds.), Temporalities of Reproduction, special issue, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (2015) 1 Google Scholar.

25 This was an evident endeavour, given that the organism was understood as a structure–function complex. Cheung, Tobias, ‘What is an “organism”? On the occurrence of a new term and its conceptual transformations 1680–1850’, History of Philosophy of the Life Sciences (2010), 32, pp. 155–194 Google Scholar. However, foetal physiology has so far not received much historiographical attention, which might be due to the fact that it did not gain a subdisciplinary identity akin to embryology – despite attempts by authors such as Johannes Müller or William Thierry Preyer. Some literature, especially for the early twentieth century, is examined in Dubow, Sara, Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 Google Scholar.

26 Müller, Johannes, ‘Zur Physiologie des Foetus’, Zeitschrift für die Anthropologie (1824), 2nd quarterly, pp. 423–483 Google Scholar.

27 Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's notion of ‘epistemic thing’ draws attention to how research, like that described, is kept in motion by the constant difference between a technical object (e.g. an embryo at day 28) and an object of scientific curiosity (the developing organism). Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997 Google Scholar.

28 Duden, Barbara, ‘The fetus on the “farther shore”: toward a history of the unborn’, in Morgan, Lynn M. and Michaels, Meredith W. (eds.), Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, pp. 13–25 Google Scholar.

29 Cf. Arni, op. cit. (4). On the concept of development and the emergence of child psychology see Ottavi, Dominique, De Darwin à Piaget: Pour une histoire de la psychologie de l'enfant, Paris: CNRS Edition, 2001 Google Scholar; Turmel, André, A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Developmental Thinking, Categorization and Graphic Visualization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 Google Scholar. Cf. on development and literature Gess, Nicola, Primitives Denken: Wilde, Kinder und Wahnsinnige in der literarischen Moderne (Müller, Musil, Benn, Benjamin), Munich: Fink, 2013 Google Scholar.

30 Besides Preyer, and among others, see Kussmaul, Adolf, Untersuchungen über das Seelenleben des neugeborenen Menschen, Leipzig: C.F. Winter'sche Verlagshandlung, 1859 Google Scholar.

31 Steedman, Carolyn, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995 Google Scholar.

32 Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938.

33 On the history of the child-study movement and its relation to the conceptualization of autism see Nadesan, Majia Holmer, Constructing Autism: Unravelling the ‘Truth’ and Understanding the Social, London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 53–79 Google Scholar. On child guidance clinics in the USA see Smuts, op. cit. (1). On the history of child psychiatry in Germany and Austria see Engbarth, Anette, Die Geschichte der Kinder- und Jugendpsychiatrie und ihre Bedeutung für die heutige Praxis, Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2003 Google Scholar.

34 Asperger, Hans, ‘Das psychisch abnorme Kind’, Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift (1938) 51(49), pp. 1314–1317, 1316Google Scholar, my translation. Asperger published a long study on the topic in 1944: Asperger, ‘Die “Autistischen Psychopathen” im Kindesalter’, Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten (1944) 117, pp. 76–136 Google Scholar.

35 Kanner, Leo, ‘Autistic disturbances of affective contact’, Nervous Child (1943) 2, pp. 217–50, 249Google Scholar. Asperger and Kanner appropriated and reframed the term ‘autism’ that Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler had used for a symptom of schizophrenia: the extreme withdrawal of patients, involving the predominance of their inner world. See Bleuler, Eugen, ‘Dementia Praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien’, in Aschaffenburg, Gustav (ed.), Handbuch der Psychiatrie, Vienna: Deuticke, 1911, pp. 52–56 Google Scholar.

36 On the mind see e.g. Preyer, William T., Die Seele des Kindes: Beobachtungen über die geistige Entwicklung des Menschen in den ersten Lebensjahren, Leipzig: Grieben, 1895 Google Scholar.

37 On the importance of infantile autism and childhood schizophrenia for child psychiatry see Jones, Kathleen W., Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 217 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 For an overview see Lenoir, Timothy (ed.), Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998 Google Scholar. On the notion of paperwork see Latour, Bruno, ‘Drawing things together’, in Lynch, Michael (ed.), Representation in Scientific Practice, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990, pp. 19–68, 52Google Scholar. On notation systems see Kittler, Friedrich, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990 Google Scholar. Also Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986 Google Scholar; Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, Experiment, Differenz, Schrift: Zur Geschichte epistemischer Dinge, Marburg an der Lahn: Basilisken-Presse, 1992 Google Scholar.

39 Ursula Klein introduced the term ‘paper tools’ to describe the function of chemical formulas in European organic chemistry: Klein, Ursula, ‘Paper tools in experimental cultures: the case of Berzelian formulas’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2001) 32, pp. 265–312 Google Scholar. For an introduction on recent approaches to the epistemic role of inscription practices see Hoffmann, Christoph, ‘Festhalten, Bereitstellen: Verfahren der Aufzeichnung’, in Hoffmann, Christoph (ed.), Daten sichern: Schreiben und Zeichnen als Verfahren der Aufzeichnung, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2008, pp. 7–20 Google Scholar. Other examples include Wittmann, Barbara (ed.), Spuren erzeugen: Zeichnen und Schreiben als Verfahren der Selbstaufzeichnung, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2009 Google Scholar; Krauthausen, Karin and Nasim, Omar W. (eds.), Notieren, Skizzieren: Schreiben und Zeichnen als Verfahren des Entwurfs, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2010 Google Scholar.

40 Kanner, op. cit. (35), p. 242, emphasis in the original.

41 Kanner, Leo, ‘The development and present status of psychiatry in pediatrics’, Journal of Pediatrics (1937) 11(3), pp. 418–435, 429Google Scholar.

42 My analysis of the patient files is based on samples from Kanner's patient records at the Mason Chesney Medical Archives (Johns Hopkins Institutions). Kanner's patients’ medical records from the Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children are located at the Health Information Management Division of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. I was able to find copies of the files of four of the eleven patients who are portrayed in Kanner's first publication on autistic disturbances. For a more detailed study of the patient files and on the significance of notation systems for early conceptions of autism and the formation of child psychiatry see Göhlsdorf, op. cit. (4).

43 Meyer to Leo Kanner, undated, Adolf Meyer Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Unit I/2001/2.

44 Aufschreibesysteme has been translated as notation systems, discourse networks and ‘writing-down-systems’. See Schreber, Daniel Paul, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, London: Wm. Dawson & Sons Ltd, 1955 Google Scholar; Kittler, op. cit. (38), p. xii.

45 Agamben, Giorgio, Kindheit und Geschichte: Zerstörung der Erfahrung und Ursprung der Geschichte, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003 Google Scholar.

46 Cf. the anthropological argument in Agamben's later work The Open: Man and Animal, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004, p. 38 Google Scholar: ‘Like every space of exception, this zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew.’

47 Wittmann, Barbara, ‘Zeichnen, im Dunkeln: Psychophysiologie einer Kulturtechnik um 1900’, in Busch, Werner, Jehle, Oliver and Meister, Carolin (eds.), Randgänge der Zeichnung, Munich: Fink, 2007, pp. 165–186 Google Scholar.

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49 Campe, Rüdiger, ‘Die Schreibszene, Schreiben’, in Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich and Ludwig Pfeiffer, K. (eds.), Paradoxien, Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche: Situationen offener Epistemologie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991, pp. 759–772 Google Scholar.

50 Shuttleworth, op. cit. (1)

51 For example in Key, Ellen, The Century of the Child, New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1909 Google Scholar; first published 1900.

52 On Rilke see Kittler, op. cit. (38), pp. 317–335.

53 Soemmerring addresses the problem with an aesthetic argument: Enke, Ulrike, ‘Von der Schönheit der Embryonen: Samuel Thomas Soemmerings Werk Icones embryonum humanorum (1799)’, in Duden, Barbara, Schlumbohm, Jürgen and Veit, Patrice (eds.), Geschichte des Ungeborenen, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, pp. 205–235 Google Scholar.

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55 I draw on the work of Philippe Descola on modern naturalism and on his structuralist approach to an analysis of ontologies: Descola, Philippe, Beyond Nature and Culture, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013 Google Scholar. On the ‘empiricization of the human’ see Moravia, Sergio, ‘The enlightenment and the sciences of man’, History of Science (1980) 18(4), pp. 247–268 Google Scholar; Lepenies, Wolf, ‘Naturgeschichte und Anthropologie im 18. Jahrhundert’, in Fabian, Bernhard, Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm and Vierhaus, Rudolf (eds.), Deutschlands kulturelle Entfaltung: Die Neubestimmung des Menschen, Munich: Kraus International Publications, 1980, pp. 211–226 Google Scholar.

56 Bernfeld, Siegfried, Psychologie des Säuglings, Vienna: Verlag von Julius Springer, 1925, p. 27 Google Scholar.

57 On the coinage of the ‘internal other’ in the theoretical framework of an anthropological turn to ‘ontologies’ see Candea, Matei and Alcayna-Stevens, Lys, ‘Internal others: ethnographies of naturalism’, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (2012) 30(2), pp. 36–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 On the ‘making’ (or not) of children out of foetuses through social practice see Boltanski, Luc, La condition foetale: Une sociologie de l'avortement et de l'engendrement, Paris: Gallimard, 2004 Google Scholar; Morgan, Lynn M., ‘Fetal relationality in feminist philosophy: an anthropological critique’, Hypatia (1996) 11(3), pp. 47–70 Google Scholar.

59 Kanner, op. cit. (35), p. 249.

60 Camus, Albert, The Stranger, New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946 Google Scholar; Simmel, Georg, ‘The stranger’, in Levine, Donald N. (ed.), On Individuality and Social Forms, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971, pp. 143–149 Google Scholar. See also Schütz, Alfred, ‘The stranger: an essay in social psychology’, American Journal of Sociology (1944) 49(6), pp. 499–507 Google Scholar.

61 Simmel described the object of his métier as the ‘reciprocal influencing’ of humans. Simmel, Georg, ‘The problem of sociology’, American Journal of Sociology (1909) 15(3), pp. 289–320, 297Google Scholar. Discussions in philosophy and anthropology explored how humans connected, or the ‘limits of community’, as implied in the title of the 1924 book by German anthropologist Plessner, Helmuth, The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism, New York: Humanity Books, 1999 Google Scholar.

62 Asperger, ‘Autistischen Psychopathen’, op. cit. (34), p. 91, my translation.

63 The roots of the cybernetic movement go back to the early 1940s but the project was officially founded with the Macy Conferences from 1946 to 1953. Citations in Vogl, Joseph, ‘Regierung und Regelkreis: Ein historisches Vorspiel’, in Pias, Claus (ed.), CYBERNETICS/KYBERNETIK: The Macy-Conferences 1946–1953, 2 vols., Berlin: Diaphanes, 2004, vol. 2, p. 67 Google Scholar, my translation; and Ruesch, Jurgen and Bateson, Gregory, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. viii Google Scholar. The book was originally published in 1951, and Bateson and Ruesch wrote the quoted passage in the preface to the 1968 edition.

64 Ruesch and Bateson, op. cit. (63), p. x.

65 Arguably the distinction between popular and scientific/pedagogical sources is not clear-cut. In fact, recent conceptualizations of science as ‘a form of communicative action’ (James Secord) can be read as explicit challenges to this distinction. However, the methodological question raised above still remains. See Secord, James A., ‘Knowledge in transit’, Isis (2004) 95(4), pp. 654–72Google Scholar; and Topham, Jonathan R., ‘Introduction’, Isis (2009) 100(2), pp. 310–318 Google Scholar.

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67 Clark, John T., ‘The migrant in Pittsburgh’, Opportunity (1923) 1, pp. 303–307 Google Scholar.

68 Clark, op. cit. (67). Also Gaines, Kevin K., Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996 Google Scholar.

69 W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘Opinion of W.E.B. Du Bois’, Crisis, September 1924, p. 199; Smith, Katharine Capshaw, Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004, p. 52 Google Scholar.

70 Ariès, Philippe, L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime, Paris: Plon, 1960 Google Scholar.

71 On childhood in the Middle Ages see Shahar, Shulamith (ed.), Childhood in the Middle Ages, London: Routledge, 1990 Google Scholar; Schultz, James A., The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100–1350, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995 Google Scholar; and more recently Classen, Albrecht (ed.), Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005 Google Scholar.

72 There is a considerable body of scholarship about a new view of childhood emerging around 1800 in modern European and American literature. Examples include Steedman, op. cit. (31); Martens, Lorna, The Promise of Memory: Childhood Recollection and Its Objects in Literary Modernism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011 Google Scholar; Ewers, Hans-Heino, Kindheit als poetische Daseinsform: Studien zur Entstehung der romantischen Kindheitsutopie im 18. Jahrhundert. Herder, Jean Paul, Novalis und Tieck, Munich: Fink, 1989 Google Scholar; Lloyd, Rosemary, The Land of Lost Content: Children and Childhood in Nineteenth-Century French Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Richter, Dieter, Das fremde Kind: Zur Entstehung der Kindheitsbilder des bürgerlichen Zeitalters, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1987, p. 25 Google Scholar.

74 Cf. Giuriato, Davide, ‘Geschichten vom kleinen Hans (Freud–Kafka)’, in Mülder-Bach, Inka and Ott, Michael (eds.), Was der Fall ist: Casus und Lapsus, Munich: Fink, 2015, pp. 129–143 Google Scholar.

75 Miller, Daniel (ed.), Materiality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005 Google Scholar.

76 Cook, op. cit. (4).

77 Cook, Daniel Thomas, The Commodification of Childhood, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004 Google Scholar.

78 Geulen, Eva, ‘Adalbert Stifters Kinder-Kunst: Drei Fallstudien’, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte (1993) 67, pp. 648–668 Google Scholar.

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80 Foucault, Michel, Der Wille zum Wissen: Sexualität und Wahrheit I, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983, p. 170 Google Scholar.

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82 Du Bois, W.E.B., The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, New York: Schocken Books, 1899 Google Scholar; Patterson, Andrea, ‘Germs and Jim Crow: the impact of microbiology on public health policies in Progressive Era American South’, Journal of the History of Biology (2009) 42, pp. 529–559 Google Scholar.

83 On health programmes see Smith, Susan Lynn, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women's Health Activism in America, 1890–1950, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995 Google Scholar; Hine, Darlene Clark, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989 Google Scholar.

84 For example, the memoir of Terrell, Mary Church, A Colored Woman in a White World, Washington, DC: Ransdell Publishing Co., 1940, pp. 106–108 Google Scholar; also Georgia Douglas Johnson's poetry collection Bronze: A Book of Verse (1922), as well as her correspondence regarding the inspiration for writing Bronze: ‘I wrote Bronze – it is entirely racial and one section deals entirely with motherhood – that motherhood that has as its basic note – black children born into the world's displeasure’. Georgia Douglas Johnson to Arna Bontemps, 1941 letter as quoted in McHenry, Elizabeth, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African-American Literary Societies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002, p. 280 Google Scholar.

85 Du Bois, W.E.B., ‘Of the passing of the first-born’, Chapter 11 of The Souls of Black Folk, Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903, pp. 207–214, 213Google Scholar.

86 Larsen, Nella, Quicksand, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, p. 103 Google Scholar.

87 Partridge, Sarah, Balayla, Jacques, Holcroft, Christina A. and Abenhaim, Haim A., ‘Inadequate prenatal care utilization and risks of infant mortality and poor birth outcome: a retrospective analysis of 28,729,765 U.S. deliveries over 8 years’, American Journal of Perinatology (2012) 29(10), pp. 787–794 Google Scholar.

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89 Adams, Vincanne, Murphy, Michelle and Clarke, Adele E., ‘Anticipation: technoscience, life, affect, temporality’, Subjectivity (2009) 28(1), pp. 246–265, 246Google Scholar.

90 On antenatal care with regard to the emergence of the prenatal see Al-Gailani, op. cit. (22); Herschkorn-Barnu, Paule, ‘Adolphe Pinard et l'enfant à naître: L'invention de la médicine foetale’, Devenir (1996) 3, pp. 77–87 Google Scholar. On optimization see Rose, Nikolas, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007 Google Scholar.