02 Nov 2018 01:30 PM - 03:30 PM(America/Vancouver)
20181102T133020181102T1530America/VancouverReproductive Health in the 19th and 20th Centuries
This session examines reproductive health as a historical site of meaning-making, cultural anxieties, and contested medical and scientific authority. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reproduction gained new salience as an object of medical oversight and intervention. This attention frequently centered concerns over “defective” reproduction and infant mortality. Such concerns were embedded within complex discourses of race, gender, nationalism, and medical authority.
These presentations situate the aspirational management of reproductive health within specific social, political, and ideological contexts. First, Shannon Withycombe contextualizes the emergence of prenatal healthcare within early twentieth-century anxieties over immigration, race, and nationalism, showing how U.S. physicians articulated the necessity of prenatal care in terms of racial and national preservation. Next, Miriam Rich examines biomedical concepts of “monstrous” reproduction in the nineteenth-century U.S., exploring how physicians and scientists linked anomalous embryological development to claims about racial hierarchy and degeneration. Wangui Muigai then considers African American ideas and concerns about pregnancy and childbearing in the early twentieth century, situating these concerns within broader debates about racial fitness, reproduction, and maternal and infant health. Finally, Emily Harrison explores the twentieth-century use of infant mortality rates as a global metric of social health, analyzing shifting meanings and approaches in Ecuador, India, and the U.S. in the context of changing notions of medical authority, expertise, and communal health. By centering the cultural and political meanings of reproductive health, this panel builds on scholarship ch ...
Ravenna A, Third FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
This session examines reproductive health as a historical site of meaning-making, cultural anxieties, and contested medical and scientific authority. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reproduction gained new salience as an object of medical oversight and intervention. This attention frequently centered concerns over “defective” reproduction and infant mortality. Such concerns were embedded within complex discourses of race, gender, nationalism, and medical authority.
These presentations situate the aspirational management of reproductive health within specific social, political, and ideological contexts. First, Shannon Withycombe contextualizes the emergence of prenatal healthcare within early twentieth-century anxieties over immigration, race, and nationalism, showing how U.S. physicians articulated the necessity of prenatal care in terms of racial and national preservation. Next, Miriam Rich examines biomedical concepts of “monstrous” reproduction in the nineteenth-century U.S., exploring how physicians and scientists linked anomalous embryological development to claims about racial hierarchy and degeneration. Wangui Muigai then considers African American ideas and concerns about pregnancy and childbearing in the early twentieth century, situating these concerns within broader debates about racial fitness, reproduction, and maternal and infant health. Finally, Emily Harrison explores the twentieth-century use of infant mortality rates as a global metric of social health, analyzing shifting meanings and approaches in Ecuador, India, and the U.S. in the context of changing notions of medical authority, expertise, and communal health. By centering the cultural and political meanings of reproductive health, this panel builds on scholarship charting new interrelations in the histories of science, medicine, gender, and race.
Organized by Miriam Rich (Harvard University)
"Three Million Defective Children": Saving America with Prenatal Health Care, 1900-1930View Abstract Part of Organized SessionMedicine and Health01:30 PM - 02:00 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 20:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 21:00:00 UTC
Prenatal health care emerged in the early twentieth century amidst immigration anxieties, urban squalor, and global consciousness. As physicians and public health departments began to campaign for the medical surveillance of all pregnant women, they framed their arguments in terms of gender, race, nationalism, and civilization. While the practical advice provided by these newly-minted experts on pregnancy was virtually the same as it had been for decades (guidance on diet, rest, care of bowels, and clothing), medical personnel attempting to convince pregnant women to seek medical attention as frequently as every two weeks throughout their entire nine-month pregnancies couched this advice in a new context, tapping into a new American psyche. Creating the image of “American” pregnancy as one of a white, native-born, middle or upper-class woman, doctors relied on comparisons to recent immigrants, “primitive” groups, and European populations to convince women of the importance of medical supervision during pregnancy, to save both their babies and the nation itself. This paper examines the rhetoric of prenatal care with a focus on the language and arguments employed by early twentieth-century physicians, which continue to shape both private and public policing of pregnant bodies, women’s rights, and reproductive justice.
"So Degraded in the Scale of Being": Medical Concepts of Monstrosity and Defective Reproduction in the Nineteenth-century U.S.View Abstract Part of Organized SessionMedicine and Health02:00 PM - 02:30 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 21:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 21:30:00 UTC
Throughout the nineteenth century, American physicians and scientists invoked the term “monster” in efforts to collect, classify, and theorize the bodies of infants with extreme congenital anomalies. They also marshaled new frameworks of “monstrous” development to advance claims about racial hierarchy and degeneration. Drawing on medical and scientific publications, case histories, and preserved specimen collections, this talk will examine physicians’ interest in anencephaly, a terminally severe anomaly that featured prominently in studies of medical monstrosity. “Monstrous” anencephalic bodies were linked to concepts of race through a shared framework of development: just as these fetuses reflected an arrest or deviation in the course of embryological development, allegedly “lower” races reflected an arrest or deviation in the course of human racial descent. In this, monstrosity gained new specificity as a way for Euro-American theorists to articulate the nature of racial inferiority. Physicians and scientists also employed concepts of monstrous development to describe the precise mechanism of racial degeneration. Anencephaly was cast as the embodied endpoint of such degeneration, conceptualized as a slide down a hierarchical spectrum of human racial development. Medical discourse on monstrosity intertwined with burgeoning cultural fears about white Anglo-American decline: the figure of the monster, understood as a racial “reversion” produced by white and nonwhite mothers alike, exposed critical vulnerabilities of the racial order. Here, defective reproduction was configured as a key site of cultural and racial meaning-making within nineteenth-century medical science, preceding the seminal eugenic rhetoric that would later come to pervade American science, culture, and politics.
Keeping Fit: Black Reproduction and Race Survival, 1890-1930View Abstract Part of Organized SessionMedicine and Health02:30 PM - 03:00 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 21:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 22:00:00 UTC
This paper explores African American ideas and concerns about reproductive health in the early twentieth century. African Americans – as parents, physicians, and intellectuals – debated the best ways to bear and raise healthy black children at a time when eugenic campaigns and public health initiatives drew increasing attention to the importance of family planning. At the same time, intensifying racial violence introduced new political stakes in the decision to bear children or terminate a pregnancy, and black women linked concerns about giving birth to threats of racial and sexual violence. Through public forums, including newspaper health columns and magazines, black women discussed whether their reproductive history and experiences during pregnancy could cause a miscarriage, premature birth, or somehow “mark” their child. Their concerns about maternal marking had roots in folklore and science, including Lamarckian theories of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Drawing from sex advice manuals, black historical newspapers, and medical articles, this paper situates these concerns within broader debates about racial fitness, reproduction, and hygiene.
Fall of a Metric: The Shifting Utility of the Global Infant Mortality RateView Abstract Part of Organized SessionMedicine and Health03:00 PM - 03:30 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/02 22:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/02 22:30:00 UTC
Infant mortality was a prominent object of global intervention in the second half of the twentieth century. Envisioned by liberal health experts at mid-century as a blueprint for a comprehensive and cooperative approach to social health, by the late decades of the twentieth century the problem had been reduced to a target, to be tracked and eliminated through technical solutions. While this trend can be documented in sites geographically contained within the United States, the phenomenon was produced globally. In settings around the world, these health experts interacted with the wide variety of meanings, determinants, and responses animating the shared experience of infant mortality. Historical work on infant mortality has compared social responses to infant death and highlighted cases of international influence on the deployment of the metric, yielding insights into the production of policies and inequalities. Critical scholarship on the metric itself, however, has been limited. Using archival materials collected in personal, medical, state, and national archives in Ecuador, India, and the United States, this paper traces the shifting utility of the infant mortality rate and discusses the consequences of the particular diplomatic approach it espoused. The shifting meanings and approaches to the IMR critically elucidate historical changes in medical authority, expertise, and responsibility, as well as notions of community and the very ways of counting the “global” in human health.
