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‘The bones tell a story the child is too young or too frightened to tell’: The Battered Child Syndrome in Post-war Britain and America
This article traces the emergence of child abuse as a medical concern in post-war Britain and America. In the early 1960s American paediatricians and radiologists defined the ‘battered child syndrome’ to characterise infants subjected to serious physical abuse. In the British context, paediatricians...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Oxford University Press
2015
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4623854/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26516299 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkv040 |
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author | Crane, Jennifer |
author_facet | Crane, Jennifer |
author_sort | Crane, Jennifer |
collection | PubMed |
description | This article traces the emergence of child abuse as a medical concern in post-war Britain and America. In the early 1960s American paediatricians and radiologists defined the ‘battered child syndrome’ to characterise infants subjected to serious physical abuse. In the British context, paediatricians and radiologists, but also dermatologists and ophthalmologists, drew upon this work and sought to identify clear diagnostic signs of child maltreatment. For a time, the x-ray seemed to provide a reliable and objective visualisation of child maltreatment. By 1970, however, medical professionals began to invite social workers and policy makers to aid them in the diagnosis and management of child abuse. Discourse around the ‘battered child syndrome’, specifically, faded away, whilst concerns around child abuse grew. The battered child syndrome was a brief phenomenon of the 1960s, examination of which can inform the histories of medical authority, radiology and secrecy and privacy in the post-war period. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4623854 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | Oxford University Press |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-46238542015-10-29 ‘The bones tell a story the child is too young or too frightened to tell’: The Battered Child Syndrome in Post-war Britain and America Crane, Jennifer Soc Hist Med Original Articles This article traces the emergence of child abuse as a medical concern in post-war Britain and America. In the early 1960s American paediatricians and radiologists defined the ‘battered child syndrome’ to characterise infants subjected to serious physical abuse. In the British context, paediatricians and radiologists, but also dermatologists and ophthalmologists, drew upon this work and sought to identify clear diagnostic signs of child maltreatment. For a time, the x-ray seemed to provide a reliable and objective visualisation of child maltreatment. By 1970, however, medical professionals began to invite social workers and policy makers to aid them in the diagnosis and management of child abuse. Discourse around the ‘battered child syndrome’, specifically, faded away, whilst concerns around child abuse grew. The battered child syndrome was a brief phenomenon of the 1960s, examination of which can inform the histories of medical authority, radiology and secrecy and privacy in the post-war period. Oxford University Press 2015-11 2015-04-15 /pmc/articles/PMC4623854/ /pubmed/26516299 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkv040 Text en © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Original Articles Crane, Jennifer ‘The bones tell a story the child is too young or too frightened to tell’: The Battered Child Syndrome in Post-war Britain and America |
title | ‘The bones tell a story the child is too young or too frightened to tell’: The Battered Child Syndrome in Post-war Britain and America |
title_full | ‘The bones tell a story the child is too young or too frightened to tell’: The Battered Child Syndrome in Post-war Britain and America |
title_fullStr | ‘The bones tell a story the child is too young or too frightened to tell’: The Battered Child Syndrome in Post-war Britain and America |
title_full_unstemmed | ‘The bones tell a story the child is too young or too frightened to tell’: The Battered Child Syndrome in Post-war Britain and America |
title_short | ‘The bones tell a story the child is too young or too frightened to tell’: The Battered Child Syndrome in Post-war Britain and America |
title_sort | ‘the bones tell a story the child is too young or too frightened to tell’: the battered child syndrome in post-war britain and america |
topic | Original Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4623854/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26516299 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkv040 |
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