2026/07/01 by Olivia Formby
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Archaeology and Rock Art Studies #Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes #Themes in Literature Analysis
paper · doi:10.1086/740587
openalex publication_date 2026/07/01 · openalex created_date 2026/07/31 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, medical writers, practitioners, and parents alike recognized “frowardness”—expressed through sounds and bodily gestures imbued with disquiet or even anger—as the teething infant’s emotional language of pain. This article reconstructs the figure of the froward infant in early modern medicine and traces representations of teething infants’ frowardness in contemporary medical literature, parents’ life writings, and in the casebooks of the astrological physician Richard Napier. The ability of froward infants to affect a correlative disquiet in others, and of the sounds and gestures of frowardness to be interpreted as meaningful and even purposeful communications about the state of their bodies, suggests a more agentic role for the infant in premodern medicine than has previously been considered.