Health and the Modern Home explores shifting and contentious debates about the impact of the domestic environment on health in the modern period. Drawing on recent scholarship, contributors expose the socio-political context in which the physical and emotional environment of "the modern home" and "family" became implicated in the maintenance of health and in the aetiology and pathogenesis of diverse psychological and physical conditions. In addition, they critically analyze the manner in which the expression and articulation of medical concerns about the domestic environment served to legitimate particular political and ideological positions.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction
Mark Jackson
Part One Emotional health and the home
2. Inventing the suburban neurosis
Rhodri Hayward
3. Anne Sexton’s poetics of the suburbs
Jo Gill
4. `Keeping going’; the housewife, neuroses and the domestic environment, 1945-70
Ali Haggett
5. `A Bill of Divorcement’: theatrical and cinematic portrayals of mental and marital
breakdown in the dysfunctional upper/middle-class family, 1921-31
Michael Clark
6. `I thought you would want to come and see his home’: child guidance and
psychiatric social work in the inter-war period
John Stewart
7. `Rabbits and rebels’: the medicalisation and marginalisation of maladjusted
children in mid-twentieth-century Britain
Sarah Hayes
8. `Allergy con amore’: psychodynamic approaches to asthma in the mid-twentieth
century
Mark Jackson
Part Two Health and the material environment
9. Cockroaches, housing and race: a history of asthma and urban ecology in America
Gregg Mitman
10. Social scientists and civil servants: the transmitted deprivation debate, 1970-82
John Welshman
11. The home fires: heat, health and housing in Britain, circa 1900-1960
Stephen Mosley
12. Clean air, coal and the regulation of the domestic hearth in post-war Britain
Catherine Mills
13. A case in which going beyond narrowly viewing the home as environment changed
medicine: childhood lead poisoning
John Burnham
14. Into the mouths of babes: hyperactivity, food additives, and the rejection of the
Feingold Diet
Matthew Smith
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Mark Jackson is Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter. He is the author of New-Born Child Murder (Manchester, 1996), The Borderland of Imbecility (Manchester, 2000), and Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady (London, 2006).
