Despite a number of historical investigations of the child welfare system and of specific American orphanages, the human faces in the orphanage, its children, have been largely ignored. This project will begin to address this imbalance. Inmates of orphanages will be studied by looking at their use as subjects of medical and behavioral research during the years 1900 to 1945. The objective is to define the attributes of children who lived in orphanages and to elucidate how research using these children shaped the foundations of pediatrics, child psychiatry, public health and child development. Much of the preliminary work in this project has been completed. Children who lived in orphanages are here called """"""""spare children"""""""" because they were spare in all the meanings of the word. A body of scientific knowledge about the normal child and about child health was generated by studying children in orphanages, although often they were neither normal nor healthy. Orphanages were the settings for the development of adequate substitutes for mothers' milk, for discovery of techniques for preventing infant mortality, for construction of norms for growth of infants and children, for the refining of techniques for conferring immunity to diphtheria and for recognition of the requisites of infant mental health and development. This research was made possible because scientists availed themselves of a very old custom by using as subjects children from whom no parental permission was required--the inmates of orphanages. The use of these children as subjects in this research is unknown. A picture of spare children will be constructed by looking at information physicians and scientists at the time ignored, glossed over, struggled with or concealed in their research reports: the differences between inmates and children in families. This method is designed to circumvent the problems of other investigations. Because children in orphanages left little evidence, they have been described from the top down in accounts written by charity workers and administrators. In contrast, this project will use heretofore unstudied evidence from scientific research to assemble fresh knowledge about the children who lived in orphanages.
