“Science Claims the American Baby!”:

Morality, theology, secularism, and science were intricately interwoven in the enterprises of child health, medicine, and psy-sciences in late nineteenth-century America. While the mid-nineteenth century marked the rise in the popularization of the scientific paradigm in matters of child-rearing, and the gradual shift of moral and epistemological authority from pastor to physician, notions of morality and spirituality did not disappear from the pages of medical and scientific discourse. In this article, I suggest that the medical and scientific enterprises of infancy involved a dynamic symbiosis rather than a replacement of the religious model with the scientific and secular model, or the nonbiological (i.e., immaterial, moral, and spiritual) with the biological. While historians have often viewed this period as the ascendancy of medicine’s focus on the physiological aspects of infants, this focus was not separate from but bound up or entangled with a concern for their moral and spiritual agency.