Browsing some 1909 issues of the London-published Strand Magazine, I
happened to find a photo of a tightly swaddled infant, submitted by an
English amateur. Maybe this quote will interest a few of you:
"HOW BABIES ARE DRESSED IN ITALY.
This photograph of an Italian child about six months old shows the way in
which all Italian babies are wrapped round with a kind of bandage many
yards long, their arms and legs so tightly bound that they cannot move
them. The Italian women say that if they were not bound thus the children
would not grow up straight, and in a small village I visited, about forty
miles from Genoa amongst the mountains, they were most astonished to see
an English baby without any of these extraordinary wrappings."
Apparently, in a remote 1909 Italian mountain village, swaddling was
normal -- of course this doesn't tell us much about "all Italian babies".
The visiting Englishman found this custom strange enough to get his
camera; and for the magazine's editors, this was strange enough to publish
the photo as a curiosity. The phrasing of their comment ("a kind of
bandage") suggests that they had never before heard of something
like this.
Source: The Strand Magazine, XXXVII p.752 (June 1909)
Dr. Henk van Setten -
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Associate-Professor, History of Education and Childhood.
Editor, The History of Education Site:
http://www.socsci.kun.nl/ped/whp/histeduc/
Website email: [log in to unmask]
Personal email: [log in to unmask]
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University Nijmegen,
dept. Algemene Pedagogiek,
PO Box 9104,
6500 HE Nijmegen,
Netherlands
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