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CHAPTER 1 continued
pages 42 - ? back to pp. 23 - 41

FOUNDATIONS OF PSYCHOHISTORY
by LLOYD DEMAUSE

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wondered if swaddling shouldn't be tried again.(205) The historical sources confirm this picture; doctors since antiquity agreed that "wakefulness does not happen to children naturally nor from habit, i.e., customarily, for they always sleep," and children were described as being laid for hours behind the hot oven, hung on pegs on the wall, placed in tubs, and in general, "left, like a parcel, in every convenient corner."(206) Almost all nations swaddled. Even in ancient Egypt, where it is claimed children were not swaddled because paintings showed them naked, swaddling may have been practiced, for Hippocrates said the Egyptians swaddle, and occasional figurines showed swaddling clothes.(207) Those few areas where swaddling was not used, such as in ancient Sparta and in the Scottish highlands, were also areas of the most severe hardening practices, as though the only possible choice were between tight swaddling or being carried about naked and made to run in the snow without clothes.(208) Swaddling was so taken for granted that the evidence for length of swaddling is quite spotty prior to early moderntimes. Soranus says the Romans unswaddled at from 40 to 60 days; hopefully, this is more accurate than Plato's "two years."(209) Tight swaddling, often including strapping to carrying-boards, continued throughout the Middle Ages, but I have not yet been able to find out for how many months.(210) The few source references in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, plus a study of the art of the period, suggest a pattern of total swaddling

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in those centuries for between one to four months; then the arms were left free and the body and legs remained swaddled for between six to nine months.(211) The English led the way in ending swaddling, as they did in ending outside wet-nursing. Swaddling in England and America was on its way out by the end of the eighteenth century, and in France and Germany by the nineteenth century.(212)

Once the infant was released from its swaddling bands, physical restraints of all kinds continued, varying by country and period. Children were sometimes tied to chairs to prevent their crawling. Right into the nineteenth century leading strings were tied to the child's clothes to control it and swing it about. Corsets and stays made of bone, wood, or iron were often used for both sexes. Children were sometimes strapped into backboards and their feet put in stocks while they studied, and iron collars and other devices were used to "Improve posture," like the one Francis Kemble described: "a hideous engine of torture of the backboard species, made of steel covered with red morocco, which consisted of a flat piece placed on my back, and strapped down to my waist with a belt and secured at the top by two epaulets strapped over my shoulders. From the middle of this there rose a steel rod or spine,

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with a steel collar which encircled my throat and fastened behind."(213) These devices seemed to be more commonly used in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries than in medieval times, but this could be due to the paucity of earlier sources. Two practices, however, were probably common to every country since antiquity. The first is the general scantiness of dress for "hardening" purposes; the second is the use of stool like devices which were supposed to assist walking, but in fact were used to prevent crawling, which was considered animal-like. Felix Wurtz (1563) describes the use of one version:

 

FOUNDATIONS OF PSYCHOHISTORY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
on to pages 45 - 50

by: Lloyd deMause
The Institute for Psychohistory
140 Riverside Drive, NY NY 10024