Biographie

Felix is an SNSF Ambizione fellow at the chair for medical humanities. He leads a small research group with a project entitled Raising a Well-Grown Child: Media and Material Cultures of Child Health in the Early Nineteenth Century (https://p3.snf.ch/project-193557). The project explores the cultural history of child health in German and French-speaking Europe in the early nineteenth century focusing on an analysis of popular periodicals, material culture, and domestic, medical, and pedagogical practices. See also: https://www.unifr.ch/research/en/news/news/26625/trad. Additionally, Felix is currently finalizing a book manuscript entiteled Watching Babies: A History of Infant Mental Health (in preparation for publication with the Chicago University Press) that tells the story of how the baby has become a patient in twentieth and twenty-first century mental healthcare. He is also working on another book project on the history of pediatric pharmaceuticals in Switzerland. Since 2020, Felix is secretary of the Swiss Society for the History of Medicine, and, since 2024, co-editor-in-chief of the European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health. From June 2025, Felix will be SNSF Professor at the Institut des humanité en médecine at the CHUV-UNIL in Lausanne leading a SNSF starting grant research group with the project Pediatric Drugs since 1945: From Local Practice to Global Politics (https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/226098).

Felix was awarded a joint PhD from the Program in the History of Science and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University (USA) in 2018. His PhD-thesis explores the use of audiovisual technologies in the history of early chilhood psychiatry. In 2010, Felix received a Doctor medicinae (doctoral degree in medicine) from the Charité Berlin (Germany) and an MSc in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from Imperial College London (UK). In 2008, he graduated with an medical degree from the Charité. Subsequently, he worked as an assistant doctor in, first, internal medicine, and, later, pediatrics and child psychiatry.

Recherche et publications

• Articles de revues évaluées par des pairs
  6 publications

  Mother-blaming revisited: Gender, cinematography, and infant research in the heyday of psychoanalysis
  Felix E. Rietmann, History of the Human Sciences (2023) | Article

  Raising a well-grown child: Popular periodicals and the cultural history of child health in the early nineteenth century
  Felix E. Rietmann, KulturPoetik [cultural poetics] (2022) | Article

  Von Systemanalyse zu Familiennarrativ: Kleinkindpsychiatrie in Lausanne
  Felix E. Rietmann, Itinera. Beiheft zur Schweizerischen Zeitschrift für Geschichte 50 (2022): 79-93. (2022) | Article

  No Escape from Fleck
  Felix E. Rietmann, Isis (2018) | Article

  Knowledge of childhood: materiality, text, and the history of science – an interdisciplinary round table discussion
  The British Journal for the History of Science (2017) | Article

  Visualiser l’esprit de l’enfant : une généalogie de l’image en pédopsychiatrie
  Neuropsychiatrie de l'Enfance et de l'Adolescence (2016) | Article

• Chaptires d'ouvrages collectifs
  1 publication

  2023

  Of Still Faces and Micro-Plots: Audiovisual Narration in Infant Mental Health , dans Narrative Structure and Narrative Knowing in Medicine and Science
  Felix E. Rietmann (2023), ISBN: 9783111319971 | Chapitre de livre

• Comptes-rendus d'ouvrages
  4 publications

  Intelligent love: the story of Clara Park, her autistic daughter, and the myth of the refrigerator mother
  Felix E. Rietmann, Intellectual History Review (2022) | Recension

  Book review: Une histoire comparée de la psychiatrie: Henri Ellenberger (1905‐1993) by Emmanuel Delille. Éditions Rue d'Ulm/Presses de l'École Normale Supérieure, 2021. 400 pp. 25.00 €. ISBN 978‐2‐7288‐0749‐9
  Felix E. Rietmann, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (2022) | Recension

  Book Review: Deborah Blythe Doroshow: Emotionally Disturbed. A History of Caring for America’s Troubled Children. Chicago, The University Press of Chicago, 2019.
  Rietmann, Felix, Gesnerus (2020) | Recension

  Book Review: Golden, Janet: Babies Made us Modern. How Infants Brought America into the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
  Rietmann, Felix, Gesnerus (2019) | Recension

• Monographies
  2 publications

  Seeing the Infant Audiovisual Technologies and the Mind Sciences of the Child
  (2018) | Thèse

  ClC-channels and etoposide resistance: An experimental study of the neuroendocrine tumour cell line LCC-18
  Felix Rietmann (Saarbrücken: Suedwestdeutscher Verlag fuer Hochschulschriften, 2011), ISBN: 978-3-8381-2530-5 | Livre

• Online Contributions
  1 publication

  Introduction: Book Forum on ‘The Doctor Who Wasn’t There’ and ‘The Distance Cure’
  , Somatosphere (2024) | Autre

• Ouvrages dirigés
  1 publication

  Handbuch für Literatur und Medizin: Handbücher zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Philologie
  Felix E. Rietmann (De Gruyter, 2025) | Ouvrage édité

• Projets de recherche

  Raising a Well-Grown Child: Media and Material Cultures of Child Health in the Early Nineteenth Century
  Statut: En cours

  Début	01.06.2021
  Fin	31.05.2025
  Financement	FNS  Voir la fiche du projet
  The project seeks to provide the first historical study of the impact of popular print media on understandings of health and illness in childhood in German speaking-Europe in the early 19th century. During that time, children moved into the focus of a rising commercial culture that included periodicals, playthings, and medico-pedagogical devices. This print and material culture of childhood has hardly been used as a source basis for the history of science and medicine. This is a considerable omission if we consider the importance of magazines for the emergence of the modern public sphere and their corresponding impact on social and cultural discourses. To address this gap in our historical understanding of modern science, medicine and childhood, my project combines medical and media historical approaches. It focuses on three main questions: What is the impact of magazines on concepts of health and illness in childhood in the early 19th century? What role did the popular discourse about child health play in the professionalization of pediatrics? And, how did it inform domestic, educational, and medical practices? The project is divided into three interrelated parts. The first part focuses on the analysis of magazines published in German-speaking Europe (primarily Prussia, Southern German States, and Northern Switzerland) between ca. 1800 and 1860. The periodical press during that period is heterogeneous, quickly changing, and still insufficiently explored. Part and parcel of the project will be to provide an overview of magazines pertaining to child health and child health education. Examples include print media providing an educated public with news about the sciences and the arts (e.g. Cotta’s Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände [1807-1865]), magazines for a mass popular audience (e.g. penny-magazines [since the 1830s]), and periodicals aiming at a scientific education of children (e.g. Des Knaben Lust und Lehr [1857-1866]). Attention will be paid to content, genre, and mode of address of articles, para-textual aspects (e.g. design, images), as well as context of production, distribution, and reception (authors, editors, publishers, readers). The aim of this first part is to map themes and topics of popular discussion, trace the historical development of discourses, and situate the magazines in a changing social and professional landscape. To master the considerable amount of source material, the exploration will draw on digital tools using the software NVivo. In a second step, the popular discourse about child health in magazines will be contextualized with a range of additional published textual sources, including advice books, educational materials, professional medical journals, and medical treatises. The main purpose of this second part is to trace the impact of popular discourse on medical professionalization and scientific debate. Finally, I will selectively draw on three types of additional archival sources to anchor the analysis in contemporary practices: collections of playthings and educational objects, documents from private families concerning child education, and practice journals of physicians. These last sets of sources will provide case studies for an assessment of domestic, educational, and medical practices. The project will result in a referential body of work on the history of child health in the German public sphere in the early nineteenth century. It will provide a major complementary perspective to institutional and professional histories of pediatrics, pedagogy, and child psychiatry, and offer new insights into the history of modern childhood. The study will also be of interest to media scholars, furnishing a major historical study of the still little explored magazine culture of the early 19th century.

Enseignement et cours

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