Changing perspectives on the child at risk at the end of the nineteenth century. The Belgian Maritime Hospital Roger de Grimberghe (1884–1914) as a space of inclusion and exclusion

Abstract

In this historical‐geographical approach to the Belgian Maritime Hospital Roger de Grimberghe space is introduced as a conceptual tool to deconstruct the notion of the child at risk. The starting point for the creation of the maritime hospitals lay in the immediate relationship between the idea of improving children’s welfare with healthy sea air and concern about declining public health at the end of the nineteenth century, together with a need for the moral reclamation of the nation. Within this context particular attention focused on ‘the child at risk’, the ‘abnormal child’ and the ‘mentally retarded child’. This research shows how the maritime hospital can be considered a battlefield on which two different discursive practices about children at risk (the political and the medical) clashed. Both practices and perspectives are characterized by mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.

Keywords:

• history of disability
• childhood studies
• medicalization of childhood
• children at risk

Notes

1. Unless mentioned otherwise, all quotations refer to records that have been consulted in the Archives of the Social Service Department of Brussels (General Affairs, boxes 251, 252, 253 and 260). All quotations were originally in French.

2. Episcopal Archives of Bruges, collection of the parish of Middelkerke.