Froward Infants: Breeding Teeth in Early Modern England

Abstract

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 for the sounds and gestures of frowardness to be interpreted as meaningful and even purposeful communications about the state of their bodies will suggest a more agentic role for the infant in pre-modern medicine than has previously been considered.