This week’s readings address the meaning of childhood, health care and medical practices in colonial Peru. However, behind these topics, both books share strong political and social bases: the relationship between the king and his American subjects in the case of Premo’s book and the intellectual debate on the medical practices in the colonial period in Warrens’ volume. The Bourbon Reforms and the Enlightenment also play an important role in explaining the changes in the relationships of children with authority, the link between the king and their colonies and the medical practices.
In Children of Father King, Bianca Premo uses a wide range of archival sources founded on both sides of the Atlantic, including codified law and royal edicts, to shed some light on the children’s and their families’ lives and the attitudes of authorities and elites towards children between 1650 and 1850. Similarly, she uses a census in 1700 of Lima's households to reconstructs adult-child relations and brought different generations and social groups into an integrated analysis introduced in Chapter 2.
Likewise, and this is the most interesting feature of this work, she establishes and important parallel between Lima's changing relationship between children and authority, and that between colony and king. The …show more content…
Thus, Peru offers a contrast to a literature on colonialism and medicine that has tended to emphasize the role played by representatives of colonial states and that has depicted such figures as isolated, secular agents of authority and power implementing the policies of their metropoles. In this aspect, it shares the vision of Premo that the colonial officials and the local elites formulated their own version of new philosophies and policies expressed in the Bourbon
In Children of Father King, Bianca Premo uses a wide range of archival sources founded on both sides of the Atlantic, including codified law and royal edicts, to shed some light on the children’s and their families’ lives and the attitudes of authorities and elites towards children between 1650 and 1850. Similarly, she uses a census in 1700 of Lima's households to reconstructs adult-child relations and brought different generations and social groups into an integrated analysis introduced in Chapter 2.
Likewise, and this is the most interesting feature of this work, she establishes and important parallel between Lima's changing relationship between children and authority, and that between colony and king. The …show more content…
Thus, Peru offers a contrast to a literature on colonialism and medicine that has tended to emphasize the role played by representatives of colonial states and that has depicted such figures as isolated, secular agents of authority and power implementing the policies of their metropoles. In this aspect, it shares the vision of Premo that the colonial officials and the local elites formulated their own version of new philosophies and policies expressed in the Bourbon