The Changeling
The child that was exchanged, and the disabled child of the folk account.
In the Texts
The fairies or the demons steal the child and leave their own, which does not grow, will not stop crying, eats without thriving, or has the face of an old man; the manuals give the exorcism for an infant thought possessed, and the folk tradition gives the tests: the fire, the oven, the dung-heap, the river. The amulets against the exchange, the iron, the open scissors, the hagstone, the holy water at the cradle, are in the Materia Medica.
What Medicine Makes of It
Haffter (1968) and Eberly (1988) matched the descriptions to the congenital and infantile disorders: cretinism, failure to thrive, spina bifida, the progerias, and the regressions of infancy that are now called autism. The belief explained the child and licensed what the parents could not otherwise do; the tests were infanticide, and the Irish courts of the nineteenth century tried cases of it. Luther advised the drowning of one at Dessau.
The Evidence
- Haffter (1968) read the changeling tales as the folk account of children with congenital disorders, cretinism (the thyroid dwarfism of the Alpine valleys), spina bifida, and the regressive disorders of infancy, which the belief explained as substitution and licensed the parents to abandon or kill.
- Eberly (1988) matched the changeling descriptions in British and Irish tradition to clinical pictures: the child that will not grow and is always hungry (failure to thrive), the wizened old face (progeria, or the facies of some syndromes), the child who suddenly stops speaking (autism as it was once observed).
- Martin Luther in the Table Talk (1540) advised the drowning of a twelve-year-old changeling at Dessau, holding it to be a lump of flesh without a soul; the belief reached the Reformers whole.
- The tests for a changeling, fire, the oven, exposure on a dung-heap, immersion, were infanticide under another name; Irish court records of the nineteenth century include deaths from them, and Bridget Cleary, burned by her husband as a changeling in 1895, was an adult.
- The modern reading is in the law of disability: the duty to feed and keep a child who will not thrive, which the belief suspended, and which the state took over in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Where They Part
The folk account and the clinical one describe the same children; the difference is what follows. The modern reading is in the law of disability, and in the diagnosis that gives the parent an account that does not require the child to be a substitute.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- Haffter, C. (1968). “The changeling: history and psychodynamics of attitudes to handicapped children in European folklore.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 4.
- Eberly, S. S. (1988). “Fairies and the folklore of disability: changelings, hybrids and the solitary fairy.” Folklore 99.
- Bourke, A. (1999). The Burning of Bridget Cleary. Pimlico.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.