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La contribution de l’Hôpital Saint-Paul et de l’Alexandra Hospital à la lutte contre les maladies contagieuses infantiles à Montréal, 1905–1934
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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The composition of the various departments of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia suggests how gender structured career opportunities . Between 1915 and 1920, the DPD staff was largely male. In the 1920s, however, the number of female physicians in the department increased to three (of nine physicians), and by 1930 the staff was entirely female (five physicians) with the exception of Carpenter. The outpatient departments of the hospital were staffed entirely by male physicians .24 The images in his collection therefore provide equivocal information . They show a greater number of health workers, including physicians, than would be found in a collection of medical photographs from the same period. Yet they do not document the actual situation, because they present a disproportionately large number of images of male physicians. Possibly Carpenter deliberately misrepresented the staffing patterns at the clinic in an attempt to impart status to what was clearly becoming less valued work within hospital medicine. A similar deception may have occurred in terms of the race of patients in both the Carpenter collection and in other child public health photographs . Lantern slides of the DPD show very few African-American children and mothers visiting the clinics. One image in which they are present shows an African-American woman having her blood pressure checked; figure 1, described earlier, shows what appears to be a racially segregated waiting room. For the most part, Carpenter’s images show only Euro-American youngsters and mothers, and it is unclear whether this is an accurate portrayal of the patient population at the DPD or a collection of images shaped to appeal to the interests of supporters. 402 JANET GOLDEN Figure 5. Diphtheria vaccination (Carpenter Collection) The purpose of the lantern slides was not to give an accounting of what child health practitioners and practice looked like or to show whom they served. They were meant to function as educational tools and as propaganda. Seeing their links with and derivations from medical photography and reform photography makes clear how child public health advocates adapted and used familiar imagery to their own purposes. They promised science—to be applied by professionals and taught to mothers. They presented the domain of science as vast, incorporating the home, the street, the school, the countryside, and the city. And they showed the practitioners of science to be numerous—with doctors at the helm of the metaphorical ship of health, with nurses and health teachers serving as the crew. A Vanished World Medical photographs from the interwar years introduced scenes that we continue to associate with medicine. Comparisons among doctor–patient images of the 1920s and those of a later vintage reveal a common thread. In Eugene Smith’s famous 1948 Life magazine pictures of a country doctor and in more recent photographs of physicians at the bedsides of AIDS patients we see echoes of past medical photographs . All of them display the caring and skilful physician beside the patient in scenes that are reassuringly familiar because the work of healing continues. Similarly, modern photojournalism retains the stylistic conventions of an earlier era. The youthful newsboy boldly facing the camera in the early twentieth century has been replaced by the equally young and bold drug dealer (who stands, perhaps, at the same corner). And urban neighbourhoods and rural hallows continue to be shown as decrepit and in some instances menacing, implicitly demanding attention from those who would make a better world for their inhabitants. Child public health imagery, however, presents a world that has largely vanished. There are no modern equivalents of the boys with fly bottles and rat-trap boxes setting out to vanquish what in retrospect seem to be trivial enemies. Certainly, physicians still treat infants and children in public clinics, visiting nurses still instruct patients in their homes, and health educators still endeavour to teach personal and family hygiene. Yet the expansive vision of child public health, which linked medical intervention to measures such as urban sanitation, after-school health classes, and more abundant clinic care, has narrowed. While some of the images from the Carpenter collection present aspects of medicine and welfare that are familiar, collectively the lantern slides show a world that is no more. Iconography of Child Public Health 403 [100.25.40.11] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:31 GMT) When scholars neglect to study images such as those in the Carpenter collection, they implicitly and maybe correctly acknowledge that broadly imagined child public health work in the 1920s was not the foundation...