ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

'He Says It Hurts’: Experimenting on Children in Enlightenment Italy

• In Event: Other Voices in Early Modern Science

English Abstract

In 1756, a group of Florentine physicians conducted one of the first smallpox inoculation experiments in Italy. They inoculated six boys at the local foundling home, then locked them in a room for two months, during which they observed their reaction to the procedure. Although small, the Florentine experiment was extraordinary in the place it accorded to its patient-subjects. Unlike children in most recorded inoculation trials, the Florentine boys were given a voice: not only do we know their names, their constitutions, and their daily responses to the treatment, but sometimes we can quite literally hear their voices in their doctors’ manuscript journal and published report. And they were not the only inoculated children to be heard. In the following years, several Italian physicians, who conducted further trials on orphans in foundling homes, established their patients’ subjectivity and observed them as “individuals.”
This paper examines the scientific, political, and institutional cultures that enabled this unusual way of observing children. It suggests that the convergence of a distinct Italian tradition of experimentation, enlightened ideas about childhood, and the medicalization of foundling homes led to a series of trials, in which children were understood as more than mere experimental subjects. Nevertheless, the paper demonstrates that, over time—and particularly with the advent of vaccination around 1800—Italian foundlings participating in immunization trials lost their voices, becoming as silent as simple scientific instruments. This change occurred due to political transformations that affected foundling homes, as well as the rise of modern scientific methods that favored big numbers over individual cases.

Author

• Ori Ben-Shalom, Harvard University