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This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of children's rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nineteenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child's initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge.

In the history of life sciences, it has often been argued that the individual organism emerged, around 1800, as a four-dimensional entity--a temporalized entity. Against this backdrop, the article asks how research on development contributed to structuring the time of the organism in terms of a historical process, that is, by understanding a given phenomenon as brought forth by what preceded it and as establishing conditions for what will follow, thus relating the past, the present and the future in a specific way. To shed light on this conceptualization, we must take into account not only embryological research on morphogenesis but also physiological research on the genesis of vital functions and the causation of congenital anomalies. Three layers of structuring time in such research may be discerned: the making of a trans-natal continuity of the developing organism; a conceptualization of birth as a threshold of past and future that paradigmatically reveals the historical understanding of such developmental continuity; and an approach to intergenerational transmission that confronts developmental continuity with historical contingency. My contribution focuses on the work of William T. Preyer and Charles Féré but, in a genealogical vein, situates their work in the larger context of nineteenth-century research on development.

As an experimental medical practice artificial insemination in humans dates back to the end of the 18th century. Efforts intensified in the second half of the 19th century, when, especially in France, the number of reports in scientific publications increased and the topic became the subject of heated debates. I trace this emergence of reproductive medicine avant la lettre by reviewing the relevant medical publications. Hereby, I focus on how experiments in artificial insemination presupposed a new conceptualisation of procreation which detaches procreation from the doings of human actors by reducing it to the fusion of germ cells. This "biologisation" of procreation entailed a series of irritations with regard to the determination of "natural" paternity and the impact and relevance of the procreative act's nature. These irritations are dealt with in a novel that appears in Paris in 1884, entitled The Man-Maker. This novel thus attests to the cultural uncertainties that went along with the emergence of what laid the epistemological ground for the reproductive medicine to come.