Raising Healthy Children: Childhood, Health, and Gender in the Medical Discourses of the Neohellenic Enlightenment (1770–1821)

Abstract This article explores medical discourses on childhood, health, and motherhood during the Neohellenic Enlightenment (1770–1821). Drawing on medical treatises, translations of European works, periodical press articles, autobiographies, and private correspondence, it shows how physicians promoted rational child‐rearing as a marker of civilization and national progress. These texts redefined childhood as a distinct developmental stage and positioned motherhood as a biologically determined duty. The article situates these ideas within broader Enlightenment debates on gender, medicine, and emotion, offering a transnational perspective on how peripheral intellectual cultures absorbed and reshaped dominant European thought in ways that were both scientific and culturally specific.