Judith Walzer Leavitt

Relates the story of Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant cook who became known as "Typhoid Mary" when she infected many New Yorkers with the deadly disease, and her isolation from the public until her death thirty years later

Captive to the Public's Health

Typhoid Mary

Traces the change from home to hospital childbirth, explains what benefits hospital care was supposed to provide, and discusses why home births are becoming more popular again

Childbearing in America, 1750 to 1950

Brought to Bed

Ronald L. Numbers

Whether Hicok is considering the reflection of human faces in the Vietnam War Memorial or the elements of a Modern Prototype factory, he prompts an icy realization that we may have never seen the world as it truly is. But his resilient voice and consistent perspective is neither blaming nor didactic, and ultimately enlightening. From the shadowed corners into which we dare not look clearly, Hicok makes us witness and hero of The Legend of Light. "

Historical Perspectives

Wisconsin Medicine

This classic work reveals how childbirth has changed from colonial times to the present, including a new preface that discusses writings on the subject over the past three decades.

Using fathers' first-hand accounts from letters, journals, and personal interviews along with hospital records and medical literature, Judith Walzer Leavitt offers a new perspective on the changing role of expectant fathers from the 1940s to the 1980s. She shows how, as men moved first from the hospital waiting room to the labor room in the 1960s, and then on to the delivery and birthing rooms in the 1970s and 1980s, they became progressively more involved in the birth experience and their influence over events expanded. With careful attention to power and privilege, Leavitt charts not only the increasing involvement of fathers, but also medical inequalities, the impact of race and class, and the evolution of hospital policies. Illustrated with more than seventy images from TV, films, and magazines, this book provides important new insights into childbirth in modern America, even as it reminds readers of their own experiences.

The Journey from Waiting Room to Birthing Room

Make Room for Daddy

In this thoroughly updated second edition, Judith Walzer Leavitt, a leading authority on the history of women's health issues, has collected thirty-five articles representing important scholarship in this once-neglected field. Timely and fascinating, this volume is organized chronologically and then by topic, covering studies of women and health in the colonial and revolutionary periods and the nineteenth century through the Civil War. The remainder of the book concentrates on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and addresses such controversial issues as body image and physical fitness, sexuality, fertility, abortion and birth control, childbirth and motherhood, mental illness, women's health care providers (midwives, nurses, physicians), and health reform and public health.

Historical Readings

Women and Health in America

Adds 21 new essays and drops some that appeared in the 1984 edition (first in 1978) to reflect recent scholarship and changes in orientation by historians. Adds entirely new clusters on sickness and health, early American medicine, therapeutics, the art of medicine, and public health and personal hygiene. Other discussions are updated to reflect such phenomena as the growing mortality from HIV, homicide, and suicide. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Judith Walzer Leavitt

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