The meanings of hospitalization portrayed in children's literature

Abstract

The promotion of healthy practices, traditionally undertaken by Health Education, has found in children's book a useful teaching artifact to achieve children’s attention. Despite the central argument of those narratives is health itself and thus, not illness, one can always sees references to the later theme. And nevertheless diseases that Health Education addresses are not primarily the chronic type, as well as medical care associated with them is not necessarily the one regarded to hospitalization, this is an area of practices that led indeed to the production of children's books about diseases as well as about the routines of hospital pediatric wards. So, once these, and other children's books whose topics are related to disease and hospitalization, may prove to be tools of particular relevance for hospital teachers, and considering yet, that the publishing industry has put on the market a growing number of these books, it was held a critical analysis of a sample of twenty books for children, (some published in Portuguese, some in English, some in German and other in French) which portrayed illnesses in their narratives. Given that figures are very significant carriers of meaning for a child, the sample was composed with lavishly illustrated books, so that It would be appreciated the texts throughout the narratives composed by the words and the figures. Thus, the analysis judged both the literary and plastic quality of the books and the symbolic quality of the speeches subliminally contained there. The results showed that most children's books reviewed reproduces stereotypes socially spread out about health professionals, as well as they do not faithfully represent risk factors for illness and hospitalization in childhood, specially considering the healthcare scenario experimented by sick children in peripheral countries. Besides, the results showed that the books make believe, for the children to whom they are addressed, that medical treatments are resumed to applications of injection, plaster splints and surgeries. It was found also that some of those books put on a second place the commitment they might have with the offering of pleasure in the act of reading in favor of moralizing messages about the ideal behaviors children should have when facing hospitalization and suffering. This, in turn, represented aesthetics losses to those literary pieces of work. Despite children's literature has dealt, in its origins, with themes such as death or neglection - just remember the classic fairy tales - more explicit books on these subjects were, in modern times and Western societies, considered prohibited for children. So, this research was justified by the need to fill a gap in the production of knowledge about the relationship between subjects that are taboo - like illness - and literature for children. This study was intended, also, to help hospital teachers and other professionals who deal with sick children, since it gave subsidies for interventions focused on the real possibilities of mediation established by story telling or similar reading practices, rather than those possibilities based on the perception of the common sense about the uses of children’s books.