‘A category for the not-yet-known’: How rheumatism made room for Winnicott’s child psychoanalysis

Influential psychoanalyst and children’s doctor Donald Woods Winnicott (1896–1971) began his career in children’s hospitals and continued to work in them alongside his training and private practice in psychoanalysis. This article situates his early career within the longer history of children’s hospitals and children’s medicine, demonstrating that long-term trends including the rise of specialist spaces for the medical treatment of children and enduring uncertainty about the aetiology of rheumatic chorea created the opportunity for Winnicott to explore the boundaries and relationships between the body and the mind. The Queen’s Hospital for Children Rheumatism Clinic emerges as a crucial space where Winnicott began to incorporate psychoanalytic ideas into his medical practice, and under his gaze the child’s mind began to disentangle from the child’s nervous system.