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 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.