In 1863, US Surgeon General William Hammond published a Treatise on Hygiene, perhaps the most influential medical text of the Civil War. Noting that a soldier’s age had a great deal to do with his health and fitness to serve, Hammond bluntly declared that “Boys do not make good soldiers.” The minimum enlistment age of… Read more →
Tag: Children
The Crisis of Overmedicating Foster Children
In 2009, Gabriel Myers, a seven-year-old foster child in Florida, hanged himself in the bathroom of his home due to the side effects of psychiatric drugs. Gabriel was taking multiple psychiatric medications, and his foster father stated that the doctor would spend about five minutes with Gabriel before sending him off to the pharmacy with… Read more →
COVID-19 Vaccines and Children: What Is All the Fuss About?
On October 19, 2021, the FDA authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use in children 5 to 11 years of age. With the COVID-19 vaccine now approved for use in younger children, many parents are asking the question: should my child get the vaccine? As we have already seen, many states are beginning to… Read more →
Feeding Our Children Fast-Food Ads
TikTok star Charli D’Amelio collaborated with Dunkin’ Donuts to launch “The Charli” drink in September 2020. Charli, notorious for sipping on Dunkin’ while dancing on TikTok, promoted its release to her 85.8 million followers. Charli’s Gen Z fans were eager to try her favorite drink. Within a month Charli’s promotional videos collectively garnered over 294 million… Read more →
Diversity in Children’s TV for Better Children’s Mental Health
I have a vivid memory of being in kindergarten and being called Dora, the name of the titular character from the children’s show Dora the Explorer. I was a chubby Mexican child, and those comparisons increased when I cut my hair to shoulder length, which only made me look even more like her. I couldn’t tell… Read more →
Uncovering the History of Child Psychiatry: A Conversation with Deborah Blythe Doroshow
I recently had the pleasure of talking to Deborah Doroshow about her new book, Emotionally Disturbed: A History of Caring for America’s Troubled Children, which explores the development of Residential Treatment Centers (RTCs) for “emotionally disturbed” children. The book does a masterful job of explaining how this new category of mental illness came into being… Read more →
Give Thanks for Crossing Guards
“Wait on the curb, kids. Wait until I say you can cross.” Janice, the crossing guard at Fairmount Avenue, stepped briskly into traffic, waving her sign and yelling “this means stop!” at the stray car that ignored the red “STOP” octagon she wielded. “Okay, kids, now you can go.” I crossed with a troupe of… Read more →
Searching for a Warm Home: Women and the Italian Refugee Crisis of World War I
In a 1918 article about aid programs for refugee women and children in Italy, Ernesta Fasciotti recalled an encounter with a family she could not forget, describing her impression of a refugee woman: “a true lady, fine and delicate, who was carrying at her breast a newborn of a few months, and had clinging to… Read more →
Family Separation Is Not Only an American Legacy — It’s a Racist One
When Attorney General Jeff Sessions imposed a new policy of “zero tolerance” for illegal immigration to the United States on April 6, 2018, he laid the groundwork for reinstating a policy of family separation that historically has served as a tool of racial subjugation. Native American activists remind us just how central this type of policy… Read more →
On Infanticide and Reluctant Maternity: Between Personal Testimony and Historical Sensitivity
As a historian of gender and medicine, I sometimes have nightmares about the scenes of medical suffering that appear in archival sources. The setting is always the same: the historical medical-school-turned-archive where I conducted research. Because I study surgical technologies, my dreams tend to be chilling portraits of the instruments physicians used in obstetrical interventions…. Read more →