What to do about your child's handedness? Advice from five eighteenth-century authors, and some questions for today.
On the question "What to do about your child's handedness?", parents have never lacked for advice. Over more than two millennia, however, their advisors have rarely spoken with one voice. Instead, they have disagreed on virtually everything, including the desirability of handedness, its origins in nature or nurture, and especially the acceptability and treatment of left-handedness. After briefly describing such disagreements from classical times, this article presents and analyses new examples from the works of five authors in the eighteenth century, three from England ("An Eminent Physician", William Cadogan, and John Hill) and two from France (Nicholas Andry and Jean-Jacques Rousseau). It then presents similar examples from more recent authors, and it concludes by asking what advice about handedness the current generation of laterality researchers would be prepared to offer.
Harris
Lauren Julius
LJ
Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing 48824, USA. HARRISL@MSU.edu