From “Disgraceful Carelessness” to “Intelligent Precaution”: Accidents and the Public Child in English Canada,1900-1950

Abstract

Highlighting how medical professionals in English Canada understood accidents in childhood, this article explores the emergence of the idea of a “public child” throughout the course of the twentieth century. It asks how shifts in attitudes toward public health, domesticity, race, and gender shaped ideas about children, their safety, and their protection. The medicalized construction of a public child helped foster a more recognizable sense of community responsibility for the wellbeing of particular children at the same time as it increased and deepened the surveillance of families and parents. Although the management of children has always been a task ascribed primarily to women, the early twentieth century witnessed a new interest in categorizing children, whether as infants, workers, or students, as public health and safety risks worthy of public attention.