Bringing Up Baby: Race, Infant Mortality, and the Creation of Prenatal Care, 1900-1930
openNLM - National Library of Medicine
Project Summary and Abstract
I am applying for an NLM Grant for Scholarly Works in Biomedicine and Health to complete my
history of medicine monograph: Bringing Up Baby: Race, Infant Mortality, and the Creation of
Prenatal Care, 1900-1930. This book will trace the intertwining threads of public health, eugenics,
racial science, Progressive Era philanthropy, and professionalizing obstetrics in a story of how
Americans became aware of and sought to fix the problem of infant mortality in the early twentieth
century. In the 1910s and 1920s myriad groups and organizations, both those interested in health and
those interested in social reform, studied the extent and causes of infant mortality, lobbied state and
federal governments for maternal and infant welfare funding, and attempted to convince the American
public that pregnancy was a condition that required medical surveillance and intervention. This will be
the first work of history to dive into these movements and determine how nationalism, race, and
medical professionalism efforts shaped the development of prenatal health care in this country.
There have been no historical studies devoted solely to prenatal care and my findings into the
emergence of this medical specialty and public health concern show it to be rooted in particular racial
politics and national health concerns of the early 1900s. Relying on a range of sources including
federal infant mortality studies, public health journals, personal correspondence, medical reports,
meeting transactions, sociological reports, and popular health pamphlets, I illustrate that prenatal
health care originated in a time of eugenics, Jim Crow, and medical misogyny, and perhaps never
fully left those values behind.
Investigating the history of prenatal health care will expand the historical field of American
reproduction and medicine as well as inform current racial disparities in maternal and infant health
care and mortality. In addition, this study draws together and speaks across multiple fields in history
including women’s history, medical history, political history, and social history. I have plans to publish
with Rutgers University Press, the press that published my well-received and widely-read first book
Lost: Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America.
Up to $114K
health research