Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850-1929

Today fewer than one in a hundred American babies die in infancy. But a century ago, as many as one in six did. Historian Richard Meckel analyzes the efforts of American reformers who mounted a campaign to reduce infant mortality, from its discovery as a social problem in the 1850s to the limited success in securing federal funding for infancy and maternity programs in the 1920s. In a substantive epilogue, he also traces the evolution of American infant welfare policy from the 1930s to 1990. Meckel depicts a reform movement that had a single overriding goal but was made up of professional groups with often competing ideas and agendas. He shows how interaction between these groups, as well as changing social and medical theories, propelled the movement through three overlapping phases. In the first phase, infant welfare activists sought to reduce infant mortality through general environmental reform. In the second, they attempted to upgrade the quality of commercial milk. And in the third, they turned their attention to improving mothers' abilities to carry, bear, and rear healthy infants. By placing this movement within an international context, Meckel also illustrates how and why the United States, virtually alone among the industrialized nations, stopped short of establishing a comprehensive, government-sponsored infant welfare program. Drawing upon medical, demographic, social welfare, political, and women's history, Save the Babies will be of interest to historians and policymakers alike, and provides context for a contemporary understanding of many health issues that are still with us today. Richard Meckel is Associate Professor in the Department of AmericanCivilization and the Department of History, Brown University.