Infant Pain Denial Topic Of W&L Lecture
Leticia Fernández-Fontecha, visiting assistant professor of history, will deliver a lecture on “Infant Pain Denial” at Washington and Lee University at 12:30 p.m. on Feb. 3 in the Houston H. Harte Center Gallery in Leyburn Library.
In her talk, Fernández-Fontecha will examine the historical evolution of infant pain denial in Britain and North America between 1890 and 1950, focusing on the scientific communities of the child study movement, behavioral psychology and pediatrics.
Fernández-Fontecha will explore the consequences skepticism surrounding infant pain had on pediatric practice, arguing that contradictory portrayals of the child in pain often coexisted, even within a single discipline. These tensions reveal how deeply cultural assumptions, professional hierarchies and epistemological commitments shaped what physicians and psychologists were able or willing to perceive in the child in pain.
The lecture is based on Fernández-Fontecha’s recent book, “Childhood, Pain and Emotion: A Modern British Medical History” (March 2025), which she began working on after spending three summers with children in Cambodia who were living and working in large waste sites.
A historian of medicine and a writer, Fernández-Fontecha is in her second year as a visiting member of the W&L faculty. Her research is centered around the history of pain, childhood and the medical humanities, and she is currently developing a new project on infancy and early life in medical history.
The lecture is sponsored by the Department of History and the University Library and is part of the library’s Anne and Edgar Basse Jr. Author Talk series, which invites W&L faculty to showcase their scholarship to the campus community.
