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  • Editor's Introduction
  • Janet Golden (bio)

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"School children, Manzanar Relocation Center, California." In 1943, Ansel Adams took a series of photographs at Manzanar War Relocation Center in California where Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II. The images include views of daily life, agricultural scenes, and sports and leisure activities. Adams donated the collection to the Library of Congress writing "The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment . . . All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use." Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Ansel Adams, photographer, LC-DIG-ppprs-00354

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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many western nations developed seashore hospitals for children. By the middle of the twentieth century most no longer existed or, if they did, they served an entirely different population and mission than the ones envisioned by their founders. For historians of childhood, the comparative histories of these institutions reveal a unique, temporary conjunction of ideas about child health, child welfare, state policy and private charity.

The articles that follow offer three case studies of seashore hospitals in different areas of the developed world. They suggest how religion, philanthropy, growing state power, scientific knowledge and public health initiatives shaped the experiences of a particular group of children—those deemed ill and in need of isolation and a regimen linked to the perceived health-endowing properties of salt water and fresh air. Collectively, the articles reveal the transnational scope of modern medical theory and practice as well as distinct national beliefs about the role of the state in the child-saving enterprise. Published and ongoing studies of seashore hospitals in other nations will surely deepen both our understanding of this historical institution and the ideas it represented.

Seashore hospitals arose in response to two particular circumstances—the growing understanding of, and ability to diagnose, tuberculosis, a leading killer of young people, and the new conceptions of child welfare and nationhood that marked the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tuberculosis, an endemic infectious disease, killed millions throughout the world, earning the well-deserved label of the "white plague." By the late nineteenth century its bacterial etiology was revealed, and it could be diagnosed via X-rays, but there were no effective pharmacological cures. As a result, those diagnosed with the disease were given environmental therapies that combined seashore bathing, removal to areas perceived to have healthy, fresh air, and a strict dietary regimen, and they were sequestered from others to prevent the spread of infection. In this era, state-sponsored sanitaria provided care for the poor suffering from tuberculosis, state- and private-sponsored seashore hospitals provided care to tubercular [End Page 217] and "pre-tubercular" children of the poor, and open-air schools served children deemed physically debilitated or pre-tubercular.

While adults typically suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis, children were more likely to have contracted bovine tuberculosis from eating meat or, more likely, drinking milk, from infected cows. Infections in children often occurred in the hips or spine (termed Pott's Disease) or in the lymph nodes (termed scrofula). Treatment could involve injections into wounds and the use of immobilizing plaster casts to straighten the spine. In the twentieth century, measures such as milk pasteurization and instruction in household hygiene reduced the incidence of disease, but a cure—an extended regiment of multiple antibiotics and other drugs—was not developed until the 1940s.

The construction of seashore hospitals reflected an interest in both health promotion and "child saving." The latter, a broad program of philanthropic and public endeavors aimed at making childhood a protected time also looked forward—defining children as future citizens who would contribute to the growth of an economically healthy nation-state. Child saving encompassed efforts ranging from mandatory education, to legal protection from the worst abuses of the labor market and industrial capitalism, to the erection of congregate...

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