Muigai, Wangui (Author)
Wailoo, Keith (Advisor)
This dissertation examines the history of infant death in African American communities. It traces the medical, scientific, and cultural ideas of the causes and meanings of black infant mortality from the era of antebellum slavery to the height of black migration in the mid twentieth century. By examining infant death in this shifting landscape, this dissertation explores how widening cultural expectations that all babies should survive, alongside African American demands for equal treatment as citizens and patients, and the growing role of government in matters of infant welfare, generated fierce debates regarding who was responsible for protecting young lives and who was to blame for their deaths. Chapter One looks at the nineteenth century, exploring the transformation of black infant death in the antebellum period from a problem of plantation management to a racial trait and evidence that blacks’ newly won freedom was detrimental to their health. Chapters Two and Three analyze municipal and federal government responses to black infant welfare in the Progressive Era, first by tracing the rise and fall of a local Washington D.C. agency responsible for the care of abandoned and destitute infants, followed by an examination of the U.S. Children’s Bureau and how it came to see black infant mortality as intimately tied to debates about the “midwife problem.” Chapter Four delves into the artistic works and public forums through which African Americans shared their experiences with infant loss and debated the racial and gender politics of “saving” black babies in an era of Jim Crow. Chapter Five returns to the rural south by way of the 1953 midwife training film All My Babies: A Midwife’s Own Story, to show how black infant welfare concerns became enfolded in growing postwar critiques of the nation’s expanding, but deeply segregated, health care system. To foreground black experiences of infant death, this study draws on a rich array of archival and primary source material, including slave narratives, folk practices, medical articles, government documents, memoirs, songs, photographs, and film. Through its focus on black health, this project contributes to scholarship in history of medicine and African-American history, while also speaking to scholarship on the history of childhood and the politics of reproduction.
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Thesis
Christopher D. Willoughby;
(2016)
Pedagogies of the Black Body: Race and Medical Education in the Antebellum United States
(/isis/citation/CBB728296810/)
Book
Smith, Kimberly K.;
(2007)
African American Environmental Thought: Foundations
(/isis/citation/CBB000930104/)
Book
Brittany Cowgill;
(2018)
Rest Uneasy: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Twentieth-Century America
(/isis/citation/CBB822383812/)
Book
Melanie Reynolds;
(2016)
Infant Mortality and Working-Class Child Care, 1850-1899
(/isis/citation/CBB958307648/)
Article
Fariñas, Diego Ramiro;
Sanz Gimeno, Alberto;
(2000)
Childhood mortality in Central Spain, 1790-1960: Changes in the course of demographic modernization
(/isis/citation/CBB000111201/)
Thesis
Davies, Linda Margaret;
(2007)
The Conquest of Infant Mortality: The Case of Hemsworth, 1871--1911
(/isis/citation/CBB001561517/)
Article
Baker, Robert B.;
Washington, Harriet A.;
Olakanmi, Ololade;
Savitt, Todd L.;
Jacobs, Elizabeth A.;
Hoover, Eddie;
Wynia, Matthew K.;
(2009)
Creating a Segregated Medical Profession: African American Physicians and Organized Medicine, 1846--1910
(/isis/citation/CBB001032032/)
Article
Baker, Robert B.;
Washington, Harriet A.;
Olakanmi, Ololade;
Savitt, Todd L.;
Jacobs, Elizabeth A.;
Hoover, Eddie;
Wynia, Matthew K.;
(2008)
African American Physicians and Organized Medicine, 1846--1968: Origins of a Racial Divide
(/isis/citation/CBB001032031/)
Article
Razzell, Peter;
Spence, Christine;
(2007)
The History of Infant, Child and Adult Mortality in London, 1550--1850
(/isis/citation/CBB001020863/)
Thesis
Stone, Andrea;
(2009)
Healthy: Medicine, Law, Literature and a Nineteenth-Century Black Rhetorics of Physicality
(/isis/citation/CBB001562869/)
Book
Long, Margaret Geneva;
(2012)
Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation
(/isis/citation/CBB001252883/)
Thesis
Kristi M. Simon;
(2018)
The Controversy Surrounding Slave Insanity: The Diagnosis, Treatment and Lived Experience of Mentally Ill Slaves in the Antebellum South
(/isis/citation/CBB530099259/)
Book
Downs, Jim;
(2012)
Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction
(/isis/citation/CBB001251688/)
Article
Nadja Durbach;
(2020)
Dead or Alive? Stillbirth Registration, Premature Babies, and the Definition of Life in England and Wales, 1836–1960
(/isis/citation/CBB241537760/)
Article
Condran, Gretchen A.;
Murphy, Jennifer;
(2008)
Defining and Managing Infant Mortality: A Case Study of Philadelphia, 1870--1920
(/isis/citation/CBB001231862/)
Article
Read, Ian;
(2009-10)
Sickness, Recovery, and Death among the Enslaved and Free People of Santos, Brazil, 1860--1888
(/isis/citation/CBB001032411/)
Book
de Barros, Juanita;
Palmer, Steven Paul;
Wright, David;
(2009)
Health and Medicine in the Circum-Caribbean, 1800--1968
(/isis/citation/CBB001230954/)
Thesis
de la Cova, Carlina;
(2008)
Silent Voices of the Destitute: An Analysis of African American and Euro-American Health during the Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001561269/)
Book
Tiziana Dall'Osso;
(2023)
Sanità e infanzia a Bologna: Cinque secoli di storia
(/isis/citation/CBB485585957/)
Article
Álvarez, Adriana;
(2010)
La experiencia de ser un 'niño débil y enfermo' lejos de su hogar: el caso del Asilo Marítimo, Mar del Plata (1893--1920)
(/isis/citation/CBB001420440/)
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