In Portugal, until the 1860s, child abandonment was an anonymous, legal, and generalized
practice. Children were left in foundling wheels, hollow wooden cylinders which rotated
on an axis with a single opening, situated in the window of buildings or, more commonly,
of Foundling Houses. After placing the child inside, the person abandoning the infant would ring a bell located on the wall to inform the wheel attendant of the arrival of a new
ward. The latter, inside the Foundling House, would turn the cylinder, collect the minor and provide him/her with initial healthcare, before being sent to be raised by an external wet nurse. The proliferation of these type of institutions and the wheel mechanism wasn’t exclusive of Portugal. It was common in the European Catholic states such as Spain, France, and Italy.
However, the legality of the anonymous child abandonment led to the abuse of such practice. In Lisbon, the Portuguese capital and biggest city, the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa (literally, the Holy House of Mercy, henceforth the SCML) was the institution responsible for raising the abandoned children. From the mid-19th century until the end of the 1860’s between 2.000 to almost 3.000 children were abandoned on its wheel. The goal, was to send them to be raised by external wet nurses, particularly, the ones living in the countryside, believing their houses would have better conditions and the children would be integrated among their families (when compared to wet nurses living in the big city). From the moment of the abandonment, the life course of these children was marked by mobility in space, not only from the institution to the wet nurses’ houses, but also among the latter, considering that the decrease in their salaries as children got older frequently led to a new institutionalization and to being sent again to another wet nurse.
From the second half of the 19th century, a debate took place regarding the viability of the admission model in force. State and institutional authorities, as well as doctors, intellectuals, and politicians, started to consider discontinuing the use of the foundling wheel and adopting a new reception system. What was at stake wasn’t the end of the welcoming institution, the Foundling House, but rather the wheel as a mechanism for anonymous exposure. The height of this public debate in Portugal was marked by a decree in 1867 which closed the wheels in the Kingdom. Instead, controlled admissions were imposed, and breastfeeding allowances were generalized. Despite the decree being revoked, in 1870 the SCML closed its foundling wheel and adopted the new admission model (in which the exposures, mostly mothers, had to identify themselves, the reason for the abandonment, and their provenance).
Despite the plurality of regional studies on child abandonment, on a national and
international level, no in-depth researches have been carried out concerning this practice
in Lisbon and the transition to the new admission model. Additionally, no study has focused on the movement and life course analysis of the abandoned children through a spatial perspective, applying spatial analysis methods and tools.
This paper seeks to fill this gap focusing on a spatial analysis and the use of a Geographic Informatic System to approach child abandonment in 19th century Lisbon, its evolution, characteristics and the life course of foundlings. It allows us not only to integrate child abandonment in space and time, since from 1870 it was mandatory for parents to identify themselves and we have information about the ones who exposed their sons or daughters and their provenance (municipality and parish), enabling to relate it to Lisbon’s growth; but also to spatially follow foundlings’ life course and mobility across time.
Having as a starting point the contemporary argument that it was preferable to send these children to be raised by countryside wet nurses, with effects on their integration, we will use a Geographic Information System to: 1) pursue a macro analysis on the spatial distribution of foundlings in the Kingdom when raised by external wet nurses; 2) develop a micro analysis of particular life courses, mainly, of two groups of children – ones raised by countryside wet nurses from a parish in Tomar; and another group raised by workers from a parish in Lisbon. How did the spatial distribution of foundlings affect their integration? And how can we track their movement and their path? Was there a different mobility degree from the ones raised by countryside wet nurses when compared to the ones raised by Lisbon ones?
This paper will have a triple approach: qualitative, quantitative, and spatial. The qualitative analysis will be based on the study and problematization of the sources on the evolution of the welfare towards foundlings, which are rich and very well preserved - the ones issued by the Ministry of the Realm, the Royal Academy of Sciences, Lisbon’s Municipal Council, legislation, writings from doctors and intellectuals, but also the institutional minutes of the SCML Board of Administration and its reports. The latter, produced since 1850, contain statistics about the SCML services, which will also allow to pursue a visual quantitative perspective, focusing on the spatial dimension of foundlings distribution throughout the Kingdom. Additionally, the SCML produced individual records for each children, enabling us to develop a life course analysis. Since the path of some children is hard to follow and the institution lost their track, this sources need to be crossed with religious ones – marriage, birth and death records, and, particularly, Róis de Confessados, a list of people living in the same house which was collected during Easter season. This combination enables to apply a spatial approach, “designing” those children mobility and building a spatial narrative to answer: how can Geographic Information Systems contribute to study the life course of foundlings in 19th century Lisbon?