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Parenting today is virtually synonymous with worry. We want to ensure that our children are healthy, that they get a good education, and that they grow up to be able to cope with the challenges of modern life. In our anxiety, we are keenly aware of our inability to know what is best for our children. When should we toilet train? What is the best way to encourage a fussy child to eat? How should we protect our children from disease and injury? Before the nineteenth century, maternal instinct-a mother's \"natural know-how\"-was considered the only tool necessary for effective childrearing. Over the past two hundred years, however, science has entered the realm of motherhood in increasingly significant ways. InPerfect Motherhood,Rima D. Apple shows how the growing belief that mothers need to be savvy about the latest scientific directives has shifted the role of expert away from the mother and toward the professional establishment. Apple, however, argues that most women today are finding ways to negotiate among the abundance of scientific recommendations, their own knowledge, and the reality of their daily lives.

In the nineteenth century, infants were commonly breast-fed; by the middle of the twentieth century, women typically bottle-fed their babies on the advice of their doctors. In this book, Rima D. Apple discloses and analyzes the complex interactions of science, medicine, economics, and culture that underlie this dramatic shift in infant-care practices and women’s lives. As infant feeding became the keystone of the emerging specialty of pediatrics in the twentieth century, the manufacture of infant food became a lucrative industry. More and more mothers reported difficulty in nursing their babies. While physicians were establishing themselves and the scientific experts and the infant-food industry was hawking the scientific bases of their products, women embraced “scientific motherhood,” believing that science could shape child care practices. The commercialization and medicalization of infant care established an environment that made bottle feeding not only less feared by many mothers, but indeed “natural” and “necessary.” Focusing on the history of infant feeding, this book clarifies the major elements involved in the complex and sometimes contradictory interaction between women and the medical profession, revealing much about the changing roles of mothers and physicians in American society. “The strength of Apple’s book is her ability to indicate how the mutual interests of mothers, doctors, and manufacturers led to the transformation of infant feeding. . . . Historians of science will be impressed with the way she probes the connections between the medical profession and the manufacturers and with her ability to demonstrate how medical theories were translated into medical practice.”—Janet Golden, Isis

Ever since the threads of seventeenth-century natural philosophy began to coalesce into an understanding of the natural world, printed artifacts such as laboratory notebooks, research journals, college textbooks, and popular paperbacks have been instrumental to the development of what we think of today as “science.” But just as the history of science involves more than recording discoveries, so too does the study of print culture extend beyond the mere cataloguing of books. In both disciplines, researchers attempt to comprehend how social structures of power, reputation, and meaning permeate both the written record and the intellectual scaffolding through which scientific debate takes place. Science in Print brings together scholars from the fields of print culture, environmental history, science and technology studies, medical history, and library and information studies. This ambitious volume paints a rich picture of those tools and techniques of printing, publishing, and reading that shaped the ideas and practices that grew into modern science, from the days of the Royal Society of London in the late 1600s to the beginning of the modern U.S. environmental movement in the early 1960s.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the evolution of school nursing in the USA in the early decades of the twentieth century, highlighting the linkages between schools and public health and the challenges nurses faced. Design/methodology/approach This historical essay examines the discussions about school nursing and school nurses’ descriptions of their work. Findings In the Progressive period, though the responsibilities of school nurse were never clearly defined, nurses quickly became accepted, respected members of the school, with few objecting to their practices. Nonetheless, nurses consistently faced financial complications that limited, and continue to limit, their effectiveness in schools and communities. Originality/value Few histories of school health have documented the critical role nurses have played and their important, although contested, position today. This paper points to the obstacles restricting the development of dynamic school nurse programs today.

\"1 Born into a family interested in teaching, writing, and agricultural issues, Marlatt earned her BS (Domestic Science) in 1888 and her MS (Domestic Economy) in 1890, following which she organized the domestic economy department at Utah State Agricultural College in Logan, Utah (1890-1894) and a home economics department at the Manual Training High School in Providence, Rhode Island (1894-1909). In 1913, she joined Marlatt's home economics department where she prepared and taught courses through university extension, reaching out to women throughout the state.5 Mendenhall's knowledge and experience at Babies Hospital coupled with her own pregnancies, childbirths, and child-rearing provided the foundation for her service to the community.

Knowledge about health and medicine expanded dramatically in the first half of the twentieth century. This expansion raised an important question for women, especially mothers, who are traditionally responsible for the health of their families: where could they learn the most up-to-date information? One possible significant venue was the public library. This close study of five public libraries analyzes the diverse sources of scientific and medical information available in Midwest rural libraries. It documents the critical role that individual librarians played in bringing new sources to their patrons, and discloses that such collections reinforced contemporary medical orthodoxy.

It was, rather, the question of a healthy population.4 Although scattered local efforts to reverse rising numbers of infant and maternal deaths were initiated in the United States in the nineteenth century, it was in the interwar period that health care providers, social reformers, educators, and politicians joined in a concerted effort to improve maternal and child health. The reports of the Wisconsin public health nurses who struggled to improve the lives and health of their rural clients can provide important insights into the ways that gender relations are reproduced and negotiated and how contemporary health care policy, norms of medical practices, and patient circumstances constrain and define the delivery of health care to those in need.