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My abstract submission to the American Association for the History of Medicine conference in Atlanta in May 2013 was accepted! It will be based off of my first chapter:
“Young Children Here March Happily Back to School”: Germ Theory, Scarlet Fever, and Domestic Medicine in Depression-Era America
By the first half of the twentieth century in America scarlet fever was a common, but rarely deadly disease. Mothers still routinely dealt with it and epidemics could disrupt households and communities. Despite the fact that germ theory offered an explanation for how the disease spread and the expansion of hospitals suggested a growth in professional medicine, little had changed for mothers of children with the disease. What had changed was the growing power of public health departments to enact quarantines, close schools, and send public health nurses into homes, placing a greater burden on mothers to carry out quarantines, deal with well children forced to stay at home for weeks, and put into practice stringent hygienic measures to prevent the spread of the disease to other households. Despite new disease theories and new hygienic technologies, the responsibility of putting these ideas into practice still fell to mothers, who sought out, understood, and wove together workable solutions to the immediate problem of a sick child. If anything, new ideas about disease transmission put more of a burden on mothers, not less.
“Young Children Here March Happily Back to School”: Germ Theory, Scarlet Fever, and Domestic Medicine in Depression-Era America
By the first half of the twentieth century in America scarlet fever was a common, but rarely deadly disease. Mothers still routinely dealt with it and epidemics could disrupt households and communities. Despite the fact that germ theory offered an explanation for how the disease spread and the expansion of hospitals suggested a growth in professional medicine, little had changed for mothers of children with the disease. What had changed was the growing power of public health departments to enact quarantines, close schools, and send public health nurses into homes, placing a greater burden on mothers to carry out quarantines, deal with well children forced to stay at home for weeks, and put into practice stringent hygienic measures to prevent the spread of the disease to other households. Despite new disease theories and new hygienic technologies, the responsibility of putting these ideas into practice still fell to mothers, who sought out, understood, and wove together workable solutions to the immediate problem of a sick child. If anything, new ideas about disease transmission put more of a burden on mothers, not less.
