Article: From stunted child to `new woman': the significance of physical growth in late-nineteenth-century medicine and fiction.

`Growing! Why, growing is getting bigger, of course', answers the `unthinking child' to Mrs Barnett's question, `What is growing?'. (1) And, of course, there is a kind of sense to this answer, though the child involved is given rather short shrift by his formidable interlocutor, and is subsequently treated to educative examples of adding extra rice to a rice pudding to get a bigger one, or sewing bits of calico together to the same end. But this unthinking child was being faced with a question that puzzled neurologists and physicians of his day. I want to suggest here that understandings of what growth was, and why it was important, became much more problematic in the ...

Related newspaper, magazine, and journal articles:

 
 
Newsweek Harper's Magazine The Washington Post Chicago Tribune Crain's Chicago Business PRNewswire Pediatric News The Nation Advertising Age The Economist (US) A FREE trial gives you access to over 80 million articles! Access over 6,500 publications with a FREE trial!