At the turn of the twentieth century, the infant mortality rate in
Dublin city was higher than that of London, Manchester,
Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Political concerns about the
health of nations coupled with the work of child protection
campaigners gave rise to a sense of panic across the Anglophone
world and caused an increase in the surveillance of the body of
the child. While a combination of poor sanitation and inadequate
feeding could account for the majority of deaths, single
motherhood and the fringes of childcare were treated as
flashpoints by local authorities, police and philanthropists, as well
as religious, medical and legal personnel alike. Sensationalised
newspaper reports played a crucial part in raising public
awareness about the infant crisis, and it is for such reasons that
this article focuses on the extraordinary case of Mrs Sarah T., who
was accused of what was colloquially known as ‘baby-farming’ in
Dublin in 1905. The case is used as a prism to examine how the
infant life protection campaign contributed to the shaping of
‘medico-legal literacy’ in Ireland. The article focuses on post
neonatal infants, aged over one month, to question the degree to
which lower socio-economic circumstances precipitated excess
mortality or if Church/State encroachment on family life and
parental rights exposed already vulnerable infants to more
pernicious risks associated with micro-epidemics, particularly in
relation to tuberculosis.