This new project explores the trajectories of different forms of infantile weakness in the Spanish Caribbean from the final two decades of the nineteenth century to the 1960s, namely malnutrition, malaria, neonatal infirmity, and poliomyelitis. I analyse representations of these childhood ailments in newspapers, popular and medical magazines, essays, novels, photographs, and documentary film through the lens of scientific history and the development of paediatrics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I consider the weak child within the context of hemispheric relations and expanding US interventionism in the Caribbean region from the Spanish American War of 1898 until the Cold War.
