The Sick Child, Humanitarian Narratives and the Getting of Hospitals: An Historical Research Brief 

Abstract
The nineteenth and early twentieth century discourse on the need for a separate children’s pavilion at Dunedin Hospital, and for a fever hospital, constructed ‘the sick child’ as an image of suffering.  This research brief offers a preliminary consideration of the way in which this construction relates to Thomas Laqueur’s “humanitarian narrative” (1989).  It examines five texts to see how ‘the sick child” was used in a persuasive discourse to get hospitals.