Leticia Fernández-Fontecha is the Next Speaker in the Anne and Edgar Basse Jr. Author Talk Series Fernández-Fontecha will deliver a lecture on infant pain denial on Feb. 3.
Leticia Fernández-Fontecha, visiting assistant professor of history, will deliver a lecture on “Infant Pain Denial” at Washington and Lee University at 12:30 p.m. on Feb. 3 in the Houston H. Harte Center Gallery in Leyburn Library. The talk is free and open to the public.
The lecture is sponsored by the Department of History and the University Library and is part of the library’s Anne and Edgar Basse Jr. Author Talk series, which invites W&L faculty to showcase their scholarship to the campus community. The Basse series is made possible by the Anne W. and Edgar A. Basse Jr. (’39) Endowment, which was created in 1988 to support the varied activities of the University Library Special Collections and Archives.
In her talk, Fernández-Fontecha will examine the historical evolution of infant pain denial in Britain and North America between 1890 and 1950, focusing on the scientific communities of the child study movement, behavioral psychology and pediatrics. Each community approached the question of the child in pain and the possibility of infant suffering in distinct ways, but each approach was shaped by competition, authority claims and shifting scientific paradigms.
Fernández-Fontecha will explore the consequences skepticism surrounding infant pain had on pediatric practice, arguing that contradictory portrayals of the child in pain often coexisted, even within a single discipline. These tensions reveal how deeply cultural assumptions, professional hierarchies and epistemological commitments shaped what physicians and psychologists were able or willing to perceive in the child in pain.
The lecture is based on Fernández-Fontecha’s recent book, “Childhood, Pain and Emotion: A Modern British Medical History” (March 2025), which she began working on after spending three summers with children in Cambodia who were living and working in large waste sites.
“That experience stayed with me and shaped the questions that eventually became this project,” Fernández-Fontecha said. “While the book is grounded in archival research and the history of modern medicine, it also reflects a deeper commitment to understanding childhood as a site of vulnerability, care and ethical responsibility. I am especially excited to present this work at Washington and Lee, where I have had the opportunity to discuss these questions with my students over the past two years. Although children’s pain is not an easy topic, it is an essential one, and I look forward to engaging with the broader campus community around it.”
A historian of medicine and a writer, Fernández-Fontecha is in her second year as a visiting member of the W&L faculty. Her research is centered around the history of pain, childhood and the medical humanities, and she is currently developing a new project on infancy and early life in medical history. Fernández-Fontecha earned a Bachelor of Arts in art history from Complutense University of Madrid, a Master of Arts in contemporary art and visual culture from the Autonomous University of Madrid, a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Greenwich.
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