“From
the Cradle to the Grave: Infectious Disease in the Twentieth Century
American Home.”
Dissertation
Proposal
Bridget
D. Collins
Revised
September 2011
This
dissertation will focus on the prevention and treatment of illness
that occurred in American homes in the first half of the twentieth
century, especially by women as part of their housekeeping and
mothering roles. Since domestic medicine can be as routine as
grocery shopping and as extraordinary as treating a patient with an
infectious and fatal disease, this focus does not preclude the study
of health care professionals, such as physicians, nurses, and social
workers, as they often visited the home and directed women in their
care giving roles. In fact, the practice of domestic medicine can
reflect public opinions of medical authority, such as the growing
acceptance of it, or, alternatively, its continued negotiation.
Thus, in order to explore the centrality of women's care giving to
the history of infectious disease, I will focus on the advice that
women received from public health departments, physicians, nurses,
prescriptive literature, and other experts in an attempt to
understand how they translated that into practice. Women have always
been practicing domestic medicine, but the early twentieth century
mortality transition highlights the ways in which domestic medicine
remained both constant and constantly changing.
