Quick — is your nearest hospital affiliated with the Catholic Church? This is a question I would not have been able to answer during my two pregnancies. It never occurred to me that it was relevant. But in fact, for a woman who has a pregnancy complication that sends her to the emergency room, it… Read more →
Tag: hospital
Sex, Death, and Atole at the Royal Indian Hospital
Mexico City, 18th Century For the wounded, diseased, and ailing of Mexico City, just about anything was better than the Royal Indian Hospital. By the 18th century it had been around awhile. King Philip II had established the Indian Hospital in the 1560s in a haphazard attempt to demonstrate the Crown’s supposed “piety and love… Read more →
Thrown Open to the Public: Medicine, Modernity, and Disabled Veterans on National Hospital Day in the Interwar Years
On May 12, 1923 hundreds of visitors poured into United States Veterans Hospital 81 for insane soldiers in the Bronx for the third annual National Hospital Day. New Yorkers toured the facilities and viewed exhibits of disabled veterans, paying particular attention to a new printing shop “where patients publish the hospital paper, Hospitality.” Touting the… Read more →
Hospital Confinement: From the 19th Century to the 21st
Last summer I had a very different experience of childbirth than most women. I was not entirely sure what to expect when my husband drove me to the emergency room on the night of July 4, leaking amniotic fluid 10 weeks early. Rather than the straightforward checking of vitals and intermittent monitoring as labor gradually… Read more →
Public Theater and Health Care in the Early Modern Spanish World
In May of 1646, don Duarte Fernando Álvarez de Toledo Portugal, the Viceroy of the Kingdom of Valencia, wrote a letter to King Philip IV. The Spanish monarch, who ruled over the various territories that comprised the Crown of Castile (including overseas dominions in the Americas) and the Crown of Aragón (which included Catalonia, Valencia,… Read more →
Handmaids, Hospitals, and The Pageantry of the Newborn Nursery Window
Sixteen minutes into the second episode of Hulu’s new Handmaid’s Tale, Offred (Elizabeth Moss), having recently given birth to her first child, follows a nurse to the hospital’s newborn nursery, where her baby will have her first bath. Arriving at the nursery, Offred is taken aback by an unusual sight. “Where are the babies?” she… Read more →