Bringing Up Baby: Race, Infant Mortality, and the Creation of Prenatal Care, 1900-1930

About This Grant

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.