Canadian journal of health history = Revue canadienne d'histoire de la sante最新文献

By examining the path taken by the graduates of the Hackett Medical College for Women in Guangzhou, this article reveals that the experience of Chinese women doctors in the early twentieth century goes beyond the model of social motherhood. Although their professional career was framed by gendered norms, which oriented their medical practice towards the field of maternal and child health, as well as towards the private sector, they did not necessarily turn their back on marriage and family to devote themselves to the care of others. Rather, they approached medicine in a way that reconciled their professional and personal aspirations, perhaps even capitalizing on their status as wives and mothers to establish their authority and develop their practice. They have thus reshaped the female professional model supposed to define and justify their presence in the public space and within the medical profession.

This study examines "scientific" mothercraft child healthcare advice from public health exhibitions (child welfare, baby week, and health week) in colonial India, with a particular focus on Bengal, mainly Calcutta. I analyze "expert" advice about mothering and midwifery given by famous figures such as the Bengali nationalist daktar Sundari Mohan Das at the Health and Child Welfare exhibition in colonial Calcutta in 1920, as well reports from public health exhibits in the region. The first section of this paper shows how baby and health week exhibitions directed public health education particularly to mothers and upheld the middle-class values on which both mothercraft and nationalism were predicated. The following two sections examine child feeding, hygiene, and midwifery. I argue that in colonial India engagement with Western medicine did not solely objectify the colonized but also allowed their agency and identity formation. These public health exhibitions can offer historians a significant entry point into transnational child health histories, illustrating how ideas and practices circulated widely in the early twentieth century and were taken up locally in specific ways.

Scholarship on Black women in the Americas has articulated the historical importance of maternal newborn care and reproductive healthcare as crucial factors shaping the experiences of women and pubescent girls. As part of the "economics of slavery," Black women were forced into childbearing and were denied the opportunity to mother their children. Some enslaved women were forced to breastfeed the children of their enslavers, helping to raise them. Some mothers also witnessed their children being sold, tearing their families apart. Enslaved and free Black women on and off plantations acquired midwifery skills informally because their families were often denied access to medical care. Despite Black women's presence on traditional Indigenous territories for centuries in what became Canada, midwifery, maternal, and overall holistic care work performed by Black women is rarely documented. Indeed, when Black women's relationship with babies and children is discussed, it is often as domestic workers caring for middle-class white women's children during the beginning and the middle of the twentieth century. The central question guiding this article is this: Based on the paucity of sources, what do we know about Black women's maternal experiences and midwifery skill set in the Canadian context? Drawing on Black Canadian feminist theorizing and cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman's notion of "critical fabulation," this paper seeks to explore how maternal healthcare and midwifery skills served as sites of racially gendered oppression and simultaneously how Black women's healing and midwifery skills served as vital familial, community, and racialized resistance from the colonial period to the beginning of the twentieth century.

This article puts into conversation Wilder Penfield's correspondence with his mother, a novel about Hippocrates he published in 1960, and his work for the Vanier Institute of the Family. I argue that Penfield drew on an epistemology of personal experience in both medicine and family life to influence the conversation about social values and national and professional identity. Specifically, in threading connections between the medical family and the conventional family, he cast the mother/wife as a critically important figure who could help the doctor mediate between his professional and domestic worlds, while not herself being a protagonist in professional spaces. This article thus bridges the conceptual realms of the domestic and professional spheres, illuminating ideas and narratives of identity that were available to doctors and to Canadians and that shaped the cultural and professional landscapes of the twentieth century.

Before incubators became a stable feature of hospital care for infants, North American audiences flocked to see tiny babies on display in incubator exhibits at fairs and carnivals. While the babies themselves were no doubt a draw, incubators also captured imaginations as symbols of scientific progress. Described as mechanical wombs, these medical machines were praised as substitute mothers, offering even better care to these babies than their own parents. Examining the popular media and medical discourse surrounding incubator shows, this paper explores the specific promise of the incubator as an artificial mother, asking why this technological replacement for mothers appeared so appealing to audiences in the first decade of the twentieth century. I argue that public health concerns about inexperienced mothers aligned with a medical construction of the uterus as delicate and faulty, motivating desires for a mechanical replacement for mothers' bodies and care. Biological mothers were replaced by a new technological system of incubators plus carefully supervised nursing, which together became a kind of artificial mother. This was a system deliberately modelled on chicken incubation, offering a eugenic promise of supervised human reproduction.

This essay explores letters between the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield and his mother, Jean Jefferson Penfield, from his childhood to her death in 1935. I probe the role of the maternal bond in the famous physician's life to theorize this highly distinctive and understudied genre: mother-son correspondence. My focus is on references to place and space, a deep interest that the duo shared. Sharp architectural descriptions, including colours, decoration, furniture, and the condition of building materials, I argue, were ways the mother and son placed each other, while thousands of miles apart, akin to the way we might take selfies today, capturing a meaningful setting.

In nineteenth-century British India, the Anglo-Indian mother and the female Indian servants hired to help her with nursing and childcare were seen as potential rivals in the nursery. In the late nineteenth century, a divide in the discourse of nursing opened between, on one hand, medical handbooks and domestic guides preferring the Anglo-Indian mother, if healthy, to the dhai (Indian wet nurse) or ayah (Indian nursemaid) as a provider of milk to her infants and, on the other, Anglo-Indian fictional works by Rudyard Kipling and Sara Jeannette Duncan elevating the dhai or ayah above her British counterpart as a source of early maternal sustenance, particularly for sons. In these fictional narratives, the dhai or the bottle-feeding nursemaid is seen as a beneficial figure, whose milk (whether mammary or bottled) supplies to Anglo-Indian sons not only physical robustness but also an intuitive understanding of Indian cultures crucial to their efficacy as future imperial rulers. In these narratives, male Anglo-Indian infants, nourished by Indian milk and endowed by birth with British "blood," possess a quasi-biological hybridity that putatively ensures both an acculturation to native mores and an inborn loyalty to the British Raj that will allow them to serve, in adulthood, as model civil servants or army officers. These fictional works, moreover, reconceive the idea of motherhood: the eclipse of the Anglo-Indian mother, who is dead or simply ineffectual, and the temporary promotion of the dhai or ayah to maternal surrogate and facilitator of continued imperial dominance at a time of rising Indian nationalism.