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Vegetables on Parade: American Medicine and the Child Health Movement in the Jazz Age
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
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In chapter 14, Janet Golden examines the practice of one leading pediatrician, Philadelphian Howard Childs Carpenter, who compiled an extensive collection of slides and pictures to promote child-saving and disease prevention programs to the general public. Progressive reformers often used the powerful immediacy of photographs to take middleclass audiences into impoverished ghettoes, thereby encouraging remedial action. Child health photography, however, was more ambivalent in assigning blame for disease and hardship; bad parenting was targeted along with socio-economic causes. Institutions Institutions ranging from the concrete—such as children’s hospitals and reformatories—to the itinerant—travelling health and screening clinics— were created to fight childhood illnesses, but all were affected by political and financial exigencies. In chapter 15, Marie-Josée Fleury and Guy Grenier demonstrate that, despite the defensive rhetoric used by Quebec nationalists to justify exceptionally high infant mortality rates at the turn of the twentieth century, provincial politicians, public health officials , and pediatricians combated contagious childhood diseases through the establishment of two modern hospitals in Montreal: Hôpital SaintPaul and Alexandra Hospital. Built as parallel institutions to serve the French and English populations respectively, both institutions embraced innovations in diagnostics and bacteriology, and both serviced a clientele that crossed religious and language lines. Similarly, as Annemarie Adams and David Theodore illustrate in chapter 16, it would be the premier French children’s hospital in Montreal —Hôpital Ste-Justine—rather than the English Children’s Memorial Hospital that would be the leading innovator in incorporating twentieth -century scientific design in hospital construction. The healing power of architecture has been a tenet of charitable institutions since at least the establishment of the first asylum, the York Retreat. This remains a guiding principle, particularly in the creation of children’s hospitals. From the ornate Victorian castles to the postmodern cartoonesque complexes , children’s hospitals were conceived as part medical centres and part welfare refuges—reflecting the dual nature of child health (protective and curative) in general. Political and financial considerations determined the fate of megainitiatives , such as the American federal government’s Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis and Treatment Program of Medicaid as analyzed by Anne-Marie Foltz.43 But smaller projects, such as the travelling clinic discussed by Sharon Richardson in chapter 17, similarly were affected. Richardson recounts the adventures of intrepid physicians, dentists, and 14 Introduction nurses who fought mud and flies to offer seasonal medical care to the children of isolated communities in northern Alberta over a period of almost twenty years. At minimal expense to (albeit to the public acclaim of) the provincial government, the travelling clinics replaced a system of public health clinics drastically cut in a depressed economy. What do all these stories tell us? First, they regularly present children ’s vulnerability. Second, they confirm adults’ assertion of fundamental rights over young bodies and minds. Third, they demonstrate the diversity of children and their varying susceptibility to the control of the powerful. Finally, however, the story is not entirely dreary: infant mortality has fallen and life expectancy risen in most communities, and abuse is no longer readily taken for granted as the necessary fate of any group of youngsters. In closing, we hope that the contradictory history described in the following pages may assist today’s policy-makers, professionals , and citizens as they think more critically about how to improve the health and well-being of all children. Notes 1 See the UNICEF website: http://www.unicef.org/wsc/plan.htm. 2 Michael Udy and Ruth Annis, “A World Fit for Children: Unfinished Business from the United Nations Special Session on Children,” First Call BC: Child & Youth Advocacy Coalition, http://www.firstcallbc.org/publications/publications_home.htm. For the UN report, see http://www.unicef.org/specialsession/about/sg-report.htm 3 See UNICEF, A League Table of Child Poverty in Rich Nations, p. 4, http://www.uniceficdc .org/research. 4 On the U.S. refusal to sign international conventions and treaties, see Christopher Hitchens, “Rogue Nation U.S.A.,” Mother Jones 26, 3 (May–June 2001): 32–37. 5 See Canada, National Report—Canada: Ten-Year Review of the World Summit for Children (Ottawa: Public Health Agency of Canada, c2001), http://www.phacaspc .gc.ca/dca-dea/publications/wsc_e.html. 6 Jessica Ball, Alan Pence, and Allison Benner, “Quality Child Care and Community Development: What Is the Connection?” in Too Small To See, Too Big To Ignore: Child Health and Well-being in British Columbia, ed. Michael V. Hayes and Leslie T. Foster...