Read Online Love at Goon Park by Deborah Blum - Free Book Online

that they were fighting microscopic pathogens. They still didn’t fully understand how those invisible infections spread—only that they continued to do so. The physicians’ logical response was to make it harder for germs to move from one person to the next. It was the quarantine principle: Move people away from each other, separate the sick from the healthy. That principle was endorsed—no, loudly promoted—by such experts of the day as Dr. Luther Emmett Holt, of Columbia University. Holt made controlling childhood infections a personal cause. The premier childcare doctor of his time, he urged parents to keep their homes free of contagious diseases. Remember that cleanliness was literally next to Godliness. And remember, too, that parents, who weren’t all that clean by doctors’ standards, were potential disease carriers. Holt insisted that mothers and fathers should avoid staying too close to their children.
    Before Holt, American parents usually allowed small children to sleep in their bedrooms or even in their beds. Holt led a crusade to keep children in separate rooms; no babies in the parental bedroom, please; good childcare meant good hygiene, clean hands, a light touch, air and sun and space, including space from you, mom and dad. And that meant avoiding even affectionate physical contact.
What could be worse than kissing your child? Did parents really wish, asked Holt, to touch their baby with lips, a known source for transmitting infection?
    If parents had doubts about such lack of contact, Holt’s colleagues did not. In the 1888 The Wife’s Handbook (with Hints on Management of the Baby), physician Arthur Albutt also warned each mother that her touch could crawl with infection. If she really loved the baby, Albutt said, she should maintain a cautious distance: “It is born to live and not to die” and so always wash your hands before touching, and don’t “indulge” the baby with too much contact so that “it”—the baby is always “it” in this book—may grow up to fill a “useful place in society.”
    In foundling homes, wedged to the windows with abandoned children, there was no real way to isolate an ailing child—nor did anyone expect the foundlings to occupy many useful places in society. But administrators did their best to keep their charges alive. They edged the beds farther apart; they insisted that, as much as possible, the children be left alone. On doctors’ orders, the windows were kept open, sleeping spaces separated, and the children touched as little possible—only for such essentials as a quick delivery of food or a necessary change of clothes. A baby might be put into a sterile crib with mosquito netting over the top, a clean bottle propped by its side. The child could be kept virtually untouched by another human being.
    In the early twentieth century, the hyperclean, sterile-wrapped infant was medicine’s ideal of disease prevention, the next best thing to sending the baby back to the safety of the womb. In Germany, physician Martin Cooney had just created a glass-walled incubator for premature infants. His Kinderbrutanstalt (“child hatchery”) intrigued both manufacturers and doctors. Because preemies always died in those days anyway, many parents handed them over to their physicians. Doctors began giving them to Cooney. He went on an international tour to promote the hatchery, exhibiting his collection of infants in their glass boxes. Cooney went first to England and then to
the United States. He showed off his babies in 1902 at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. During the next two years, he and his baby collection traveled to shows as far west as Nebraska. Cooney settled in Coney Island, where he successfully cared for more than five thousand premature infants. Through the 1930s, he continued, occasionally, to display them. In 1932, he borrowed babies from Michael