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Notes 1 From 1902 to 1923 it was known as the International Sanitary Bureau (ISB), from 1923 to 1958 as the Pan American Sanitary Bureau (PASB), and since 1958 as the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). This article will mainly employ the name Pan American Sanitary Bureau, because it was used during most of the period under investigation, but the other names will be employed when appropriate. 2 See “PAHO. In the beginning: 1920–20,” Boletín de la Oficina Sanitaria Panamericana 113 (1992): 381–85; “PAHO. The Office in Expansion: 1920–1946, Boletín de la Oficina Sanitaria Panamericana 113 (1992): 386–95; and “Response to the Health Needs of Mothers and Children,” Boletín de la Oficina Sanitaria Panamericana 113 (1992): 511–17. PAHO calls itself the historian of public health in the Americas (see Pro Salute Novi Mundi: A History of the Pan American Health Organization [Washington, DC: Pan American Health Organization, 1992], 268), but it has retained almost no primary, unpublished documents from before 1950. Many of the organization’s own publications are more complete and in better condition in the medical libraries of towns in Latin America than they are at the central office in Washington. Fortunately, records of the Pan American Sanitary Conferences were preserved, and these documents, together with more abundant records available in the countries of the region, form the basis of this paper. 3 Actas de la Novena Conferencia Sanitaria Panamericana (Washington, DC: Oficina Sanitaria Panamericana, 100, 1935), 47. See also Norman Howard Jones, The Pan American Health Organization: Origins and Evolution (Geneva: World Health Organization , 1981), 7–12. 4 Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Vintage Books, 1962). Ariès’s theory has been challenged, reinforced, and modified by a number of successors. See, for example, Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1971); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1979); Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1977); John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); Michael Anderson, Approaches to the History of the Western Family, 1500–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1980); Rosemary O’Day, The Family and Family Relationships, 1500–1900: England, France, and the United States of America (London: Macmillan, 1994); and Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent–Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 5 E. A. Wrigley, Population and History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969); Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); T. McKeown, The Modern Rise of Population (New York: Academic Press, 1976); T. McKeown and R. G. Record, “The Reason for the Decline of Mortality in England and Wales during the Nineteenth Century,” Population Studies 16 (1962): 94–122. The McKeown thesis has been extensively analyzed by Simon Szreter in “The Importance of Social Intervention in Britain’s Mortality Decline, 1850–1914: A Reinterpretation of the Role of Public Health,” Social History of Medicine 1 (1988): 1–37; and in a debate with Sumit Guha in Social History of Medicine 7 (1994): 89–113, 269–82. See also Anne Hardy, The Epidemic Streets: Infectious Disease and the Rise of Preventive Medicine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); and Peter Razzell, Essays in English Population History (London: Caliban Books, 1994). 6 Nadine Lefaucheur, “La puériculture d’Adolphe Pinard,” in Darwinisme et Societ é, edited by Patrick Tort (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 413–36; 94 ANNE-EMANUELLE BIRN and William H. Schneider, “Puericulture and the Style of French Eugenics,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 8 (1986): 265–77. 7 Several volumes comparing the history of maternal and child health and welfare movements in the West have appeared in the last few years, but little has been written about less industrialized cultures. A notable exception is Donna J. Guy, “The Pan American Child Congresses, 1916 to 1942: Pan Americanism, Child Reform, and the Welfare State in Latin America,” Journal of Family History 23 (1998): 272–91. See Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993); Valerie Fildes, Lara Marks, and Hilary Marland, eds., Women and Children First: International Maternal and Infant Welfare, 1870–1945 (London: Routledge,1992); Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity & Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States...

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