The Intersection of the History of Children and Youth and Disability History at the American Association for the History of Medicine Conference, Halifax, Nova Scotia, May 4-7, 2006

Heather Munro Prescott, Central Connecticut State University

The history of health and disease in childhood and youth is an important subset of current research in the history of medicine. The emphasis over the two decades has been on capturing the experience of medical clients – whether these are parents or children and teenagers themselves. Many of the papers presented at this year’s AAHM also represent scholars’ growing interest in disability studies as they affect children and adolescents.

Sarah Rose’s paper, “Producing the Feeble-Minded,” provides an interesting new perspective on state institutions for the “feeble-minded,” as well as eugenic policies affecting this population. Rose shows how intellectual disabilities became medicalized, as individuals with these disorders were shifted from poor houses to specific institutions where they could receive medical and vocational rehabilitation. Rose suggests that the “twin fears” of perpetuating the reproduction of the “feeble-minded,” combined with concerns about the need to rehabilitate “unproductive citizens” were at the root of the twentieth-century eugenics movement.

A session on Hospitalized Children also explored the role of institutions in shaping late nineteenth and early twentieth-century childhood. Graham Mooney’s paper, “Not Visiting Isolation Hospitals in Victorian Britain,” examined how the families and friends of patients – the majority of whom were children – became identified as threats to the public health. The concern was not that visitors would bring infection into the hospital, but that they would transmit it from the hospital to the broader community. Visitation, even by parents, became an increasingly rare occurrence, usually signifying the imminent death of the patient. Bruce Lindsay’s paper, ‘”Pariahs or Partners?’” demonstrated how new views about developmental psychology and childrearing in the 1940s and 1950s helped overturn this exclusionary policy, as visiting by parents and other family members became central to a child’s recovery. Lisa J. Pruitt’s article, “The Memphis Crippled Children’s Hospital School,” examined how the changing disease environment and racial discrimination in the South affected the treatment of disabled children. She also convincingly demonstrated that “collaboration rather than competition” between various professional groups led to multidisciplinary approaches to meeting the needs of physically disabled children.

The session on “Medical and Governmental Responses to Pediatric Disease” really should have had “disability” in the title since that was the major subtheme that tied the papers together. Walt Schalick’s paper, “’Splendid Steps’: Children with Disabilities and the U.S. Government, 1912-1945,” described the critical shift from a “charity model” approach, to one that made disabled children a central component of the growing federal bureaucracy. Sarah A. Leavitt’s paper, “A Good to Think about When I Can’t Sleep,” introduced the key players at the National Institutes of Health who participated in developing the rubella (German Measles) vaccine. She argued that federal funding and priorities in vaccine research were shaped not only by scientific knowledge, but also relative epidemic dangers and the interests of pharmaceutical companies. Leavitt also raised questions about the ethics of testing the vaccine on institutionalized developmentally disabled girls. Leslie J. Regan’s paper, “If Unborn Babies are Going to Be Protected, It will Have to be by Inoculating the Kids,” gave a different perspective on the emergence of the rubella vaccine. Regan shows that the 1963-65 rubella epidemic provoked abortion law reform and mass vaccination of children in order to prevent the tragedy of “hopelessly deformed” babies. The vaccination campaign treated children as both victims and dangers to future babies, using the bodies of disabled children to convince children and their parents to accept vaccination that was dangerous only to a developing fetus. Finally, Walter M. Robinson’s paper “Assaying for Good Mothers,” examined how newborn screening programs for phenylketonuria (PKU) created new standards of mothering. Once a child with PKU was identified, prevention of retardation depended on a strict diet, and measurement of phenylalanine levels became an index of “good mothering.” Robinson suggests that the proposed widespread adoption of newborn screening for cystic fibrosis has a similar potential for defining what counts as good mothering, since daily interventions by parents is required in order to benefit from early diagnosis.

In summary, the level of scholarship and analysis demonstrated in these papers was very high. I look forward to seeing them in print soon.