Felix Rietmann
MD, PhD
felix.rietmann@unifr.ch
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0966-0529
History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health (18th-21st century)
History of Health and Illness in Childhood
History of Medical Technology
Medical Anthropology
Film and Medicine
Literature and Medicine
Material and Visual Culture of Medicine
Research Associate SNSF
Medicine Section
Biography
Felix is SNSF-funded Professor (Starting Grant) at the Institute for medical humanities at the University of Lausanne and research associate at the chair for medical humanities at the University of Fribourg. He leads a research group with the SNSF-Starting Grant project entitled Pediatric Drugs since 1945: From Local Practice to Global Politics (https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/226098). The project explores the history of the clinical use, political regulation and scientific marketing of pediatric pharmaceuticals in (and beyond) Switzerland across the twentieth century. Additionally, he is co-PI (with Martina King and Ralf Jox) of the interdisciplinary SNSF-funded project The ’hospital discharge letter’ through the lens of cultural studies (https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/10003969). The project explores the history of the medical discharge report from the perspectives of the history of medicine, literary studies, and bioethics. Before joining the University of Lausanne, Felix has been PI of the SNSF-Ambizione project Raising a Well-Grown Child: Media and Material Cultures of Child Health in the Early Nineteenth Century (https://p3.snf.ch/project-193557). 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, and working on another book project on the history of over-the-counter pediatric drugs 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.
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.
Research and publications
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Book chapters
1 publication
Of Still Faces and Micro-Plots: Audiovisual Narration in Infant Mental Health , in Narrative Structure and Narrative Knowing in Medicine and Science
Felix E. Rietmann (2023), ISBN: 9783111319971 | Book chapter -
Book reviews
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) | ReviewBook 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) | ReviewBook 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) | ReviewBook Review: Golden, Janet: Babies Made us Modern. How Infants Brought America into the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Rietmann, Felix, Gesnerus (2019) | Review -
Edited volumes
1 publication
Handbuch für Literatur und Medizin: Handbücher zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Philologie
Felix E. Rietmann (De Gruyter, 2025) | Edited book -
Monographs
2 publications
Seeing the Infant Audiovisual Technologies and the Mind Sciences of the Child
(2018) | ThesisClC-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 | Book -
Online Contributions
1 publication
Introduction: Book Forum on ‘The Doctor Who Wasn’t There’ and ‘The Distance Cure’
, Somatosphere (2024) | Other -
Peer-reviewed articles
6 publications
Mother-blaming revisited: Gender, cinematography, and infant research in the heyday of psychoanalysis
Felix E. Rietmann, History of the Human Sciences (2023) | Journal articleRaising 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) | Journal articleVon Systemanalyse zu Familiennarrativ: Kleinkindpsychiatrie in Lausanne
Felix E. Rietmann, Itinera. Beiheft zur Schweizerischen Zeitschrift für Geschichte 50 (2022): 79-93. (2022) | Journal articleNo Escape from Fleck
Felix E. Rietmann, Isis (2018) | Journal articleKnowledge of childhood: materiality, text, and the history of science – an interdisciplinary round table discussion
The British Journal for the History of Science (2017) | Journal articleVisualiser l’esprit de l’enfant : une généalogie de l’image en pédopsychiatrie
Neuropsychiatrie de l'Enfance et de l'Adolescence (2016) | Journal article -
Research projects
Raising a Well-Grown Child: Media and Material Cultures of Child Health in the Early Nineteenth Century
Status: CompletedStart 01.06.2021 End 31.05.2025 Funding SNSF Open project sheet 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.