Introduction

Kinderforschung, sciences des enfants, childhood studies, vospitanie: between the 1880s and 1920s, children became the focus of unprecedented professional and scientific interest throughout Europe and America. The body and psyche, health and care, ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ development, children’s intelligence and their moral sense constituted new fields of research and the first occurrence in history of the scientific study of childhood. The transformation of children into objects of study involved a broad spectrum of professional groups and disciplines, some relatively new, others already established: paediatrics, hygiene, psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, anthropology, and sociology. Also, a new holistic discipline revolving around the study of children was founded: paedology. The definition of this new field of research was explosive and perceived as an ‘event’: the Belgian paedologist Medard Carolus Schuyten compiled a bibliography on the subject with as many as 4027 entries. Unlike the study of adults (which had been established over a longer period of time), the study of childhood was institutionalised and professionalised in a much tighter timeframe (between the 1880s and World War I) in fairly similar ways across different countries. France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, which had stronger academic traditions, took the lead, but smaller countries, such as Belgium and Switzerland, were also able to achieve similarly significant results.