The Battered Child Syndrome: Parents and Children as Objects of Medical Study

Abstract

‘The Battered Child Syndrome’ explores the re-emergence of public and political concerns about child protection in the post-war period, and the role of medical communities in constructing this. It assesses the work of paediatric radiologists in Britain and America, who worked in the 1940s and 1950s to use x-ray technology to ‘make visible’ the healing injuries of children. In England, the NSPCC drew on this work to conduct early studies about the ‘battered child syndrome’. The chapter demonstrates that much of this work examined children and parents as objects of study. Nonetheless, early concerns about the emotions of children and parents were present, and this foreshadowed the development of experiential movements traced by the rest of this book.