Before the advent of infant formula and the regulation of the dairy industry, babies who were not breastfed faced mortal danger with every sip of cows’ milk. As a small installation I curated last year at the New York Historical Society demonstrated, medical and technological developments at the turn of the century transformed cows’ milk… Read more →
Gay Blood Donors: Benching our “Heroes”?
When I was a child, needles terrified me, especially if they were used for blood draws. Every time my blood was drawn, a nightmarish scene would occur in the doctor’s office, which involved screaming, crying, and passing out. But when I started high school this changed. We began to have blood drives, and as soon… Read more →
Which Foods Aren’t Disgusting? On Carla Cevasco’s Violent Appetites
It has been a privilege to read Violent Appetites, the latest installment of a debate about hangriness that unfolded at Nursing Clio in 2017. At that time, Carla Cevasco and I agreed about the importance of recovering the myriad meanings of hunger in the eighteenth century and disagreed over who experienced “hangriness” – the sensation… Read more →
Deconstructing HIV and AIDS on Designing Women
Before protease inhibitors radically improved the lives of many people living with HIV in the mid-1990s, numerous sitcoms from Mr. Belvedere in 1986 to Grace Under Fire in 1996 fought ignorance and prejudice with more care and passion than many who had been elected to public office. For example, in 2018 on Nursing Clio, Claire… Read more →
The History of Medicine on TV: A Conversation with Diagnosing History editors Katherine Byrne, Julie Anne Taddeo, and James Leggott
With the second season of Bridgerton as one of the most-watched shows on Netflix so far this year, it’s clear that period dramas continue to be hugely popular. Amidst the fancy costumes and beautiful sets, one of the most common themes in a period drama is health and medicine. Medical plots and subplots provide drama,… Read more →
Maternal Grief in Black and White: Enslaved Mothers and Antislavery Literature on the Eve of War
Mrs. Tamor and her six children. Helen and her son, a child of “tender years.” Margaret Garner, an “affectionate mother” of four, also pregnant with a fifth child. An unnamed woman whose infant would soon be taken from her and “whose sufferings, on account of the separation from her child, seemed greater than for her… Read more →
A Double-Edged Sword: War and Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
The depictions of war mothers are the touchstone for gender debates and political tensions of any given period in history. In nineteenth-century Latin America, mothers became national icons and were the center of many visual and literary representations of war, at a time when the newly formed nations restricted citizenship to men from the criollo… Read more →
Maternity at War: Introduction
Our latest series at Nursing Clio, “Maternity at War,” takes perhaps obvious inspiration from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Coverage of the war, which began over six months ago on February 24, 2022, has been peppered with stories of mothers. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for example, used an attack on a maternity hospital to underscore the… Read more →
“Help, I’m Living in My Research!”: Writing on Abortion in a Post-Roe World
In 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, my friend and I were in the midst of writing our honors theses, she on smallpox vaccine hesitancy among the working class and I on female emancipation in Weimar Germany. We would jokingly say “Help, I’m living in my research!” on a regular basis.[1] We drew connections… Read more →
Menstrual Advocacy Is Flowing and Flowering
When I was researching my first book, The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America (2009), one of the most frequent questions I got was a skeptical “why are you writing about that?” So when I started fielding frequent calls from reporters around 2015, it was a surprise. They had the impression that the world had… Read more →