A Different Training, a Different Practice: Infant Care in Belgium in the Interwar Years in the City and in the Countryside

Abstract

The interest for child-rearing is taken up by Pieter Dhondt’s ‘A Different Training, a Different Practice:Infant Care in Belgium in the Interwar Years in the City and in the Countryside’ (Chap. 6). Following the hygienic movement, the fight against infant mortality also became an important policy objective in Belgium around the First World War. Increasingly, the National Board of Child Welfare made an appeal to visiting nurses in order to give the mothers educational advice in their own environment and to control the children medically. The focus in this article is on the development of infant care as a specific educational space and how this received a somewhat different interpretation in the city and in the countryside, following on the training of visiting nurses in different nursing schools, themselves to be regarded as institutional spaces of educational research. The pillarisation of the education of visiting nurses along ideological lines resulted in a different approach of infant care. Whereas the catholic nursing school St. Elizabeth in Bruges regarded nursing primarily as a vocation and put an emphasis on the social role of the nurse in the countryside, the liberal École belge d’Infirmières diplômées decided in favour of an in-depth medical training, which resulted in a more professionalised medical approach of her work in the city.