Paper provides some starting points for reflection on the attitude toward children’s health in the context
of forming definitions of motherhood in the 19th century. On the one hand, the parental responsibility for
children's health was still justified through religion, on the other, through the new social demands regarding
mothers. One of the opportunities to observe the conceptions of maternal duties about the care of a (sick)
child provides the issue of smallpox epidemics and its prevention. General vaccination of children against
smallpox started at the end of 18th century and with the initial mistrusting separated the conceptions of 'good
mothers' – in this discourse it is possible to observe the variating images of the expected maternal behaviour
in different socio-cultural mirrors.