Hygiene, good health and education have always been closely linked in the history of mankind. The advent of a real hygiene movement around the middle of the 19th century, the major social changes in the subsequent decades, such as for example the increasing level of schooling, and scientific research into children starting from the end of the 19th century, led to the creation of specialist professions or specialisations in the aforementioned field and also the creation of movements, the organisation of congresses, the dissemination of numerous publications, the proclamation of laws and rules and the undertaking of various public and private initiatives. In short, a new academic/professional field had come to fruition where doctors and medical metaphors played an important role. In this paper we will pay attention to the role of sea hospitals within the broader movement and struggle for improved hygiene. The emergence of sea hospitals in Europe took place between 1860 and 1880. The first sea hospitals were built in England (Margate) and Italy (Rimini). They were built for children who were suffering from rachitis and from scrofulosis. Very soon these hospitals became lightening examples for the construction of sea hospitals in France, The Netherlands, Belgium and later on in the United States. The central focus is on the healing and the often-therapeutic effects of a stay at the seaside. Remarkable within the building up of these first sea hospitals, is the international orientation of its founders. Within a rather short time international conferences will be organized, doctors will visit each others hospital and will exchange experiences and ideas on the treatment of disabled children. Sea hospitals were meant for children suffering from tuberculosis and rachitis, but turned very often into places where all types of children were received. Medical doctors constructed ‘weakness’ as a diagnosis for fragile children entitled to a short-term temporary isolation in a sea hospital. This intermediate category between ‘healthy’ and ‘ill’, or indeed the normal and the abnormal, holds the key to understanding the history of this massive project in child hygiene. At the same time, this medical knowledge and the context in which it came into existence not only have academic and professional implications, but also explicitly economic ones. It appears to be very difficult, when analysing the attempt to build up the European and American coastal facilities at the end of the nineteenth, beginning of the twentieth century to distinguish between the medical/scientific and economic motives. At least in Europe, the sea hospitals will become the precursors of a much broader, educational coastal tourism that will manifest itself in the form of holiday colonies and holiday camps. In Putting Science in its Place. Geographies of Scientific Knowledge, David Livingstone writes: “To understand the history of medicine, or religion, or law, then, we must necessarily grasp the geography of medical, religious, and legal discourses”. Hamilton refers to the crucial role of the local context in both generating and consuming scientific knowledge. Ideas and images travel around the world and undergo various translations and adaptations because, every time, these ideas and images are given a place in a different way and in different circumstances. Inspired by Hamilton’s way of thinking, this research presents itself as a “regional geography of science” . As a result, we will develop some regional geographies of science, combining our earlier research on the sea hospitals in Europe with new research on the sea hospitals in the US. In a second step, these regional geographies of science will be compared with each other.

In this research we will not only focus on the history of the sea hospitals, but also on the histories of disabled childhoods within the hospitals. In this, the sea hospital will appear as a site of childhood stories. In using archives and pictures we will try to trace back the journeys of some children, starting from their lives in the city to their new lives in the sea hospital. We believe that this biographical turn in the history of childhood can help us to analyse the relationships between past formulations of disability, the social and medical practices enacted within the sea hospitals and individual experiences of the children.