Wet nursing: a history from antiquity to the present

Why are modern-day Americans, especially members of the "baby boom" generation, so obsessed with health and physical fitness, despite the tremendous medical advances of the past hundred years? In Able-bodied womanhood, Martha H. Verbrugge suggests we must look beyond strictly medical explanations for an answer to this apparent paradox. Expanding upon the work of Lester S. King, Susan Sontag, and others on the social construction of disease, Verbrugge argues that concerns about personal well-being and popular views about what constitutes health and disease are shaped as much by the private anxieties and social values ofa particular time and culture as they are by biological criteria. In particular, she maintains, people tend to focus on health when other personal and social problems seem intractable. Verbrugge looks to nineteenth-century Boston as a case study of how social values and concepts of disease intersect. Using vital statistics, medical and popular literature on personal health, and the work of prominent individuals involved in Boston's health reform movement, Verbrugge demonstrates how drastic changes in American society caused by immigration, urbanization, industrialization, and other major developments, as well as poor standards of medical care and high mortality rates, contributed to feelings of vulnerability and "dis-ease" among white, middle-class Bostonians. In response to thise sense of crisis, "Boston's middle-class looked inward for stability", turning to models of personal health as the most reliable means for restoring order to their lives. Verbrugge adds, however, that "[o]nce committed to health, Bostonians discovered that the concept had no uniform meaning, and their quest had no single conclusion." Instead, they found that their understanding of what health meant needed to be constantly adapted to suit continuing shifts in the American social and intellectual landscape. Middle-class women are the focus of Verbrugge's study, due to their central role in nineteenth-century popular health movements, and because for women, the search for a coherent model of personal health was especially problematic. Nineteenth-century doctors claimed that women were inherently sickly because of their physiology, yet attempts to alleviate female invalidism through exercise and health education frequently conflicted with cultural standards of propriety and "true womanhood". During the latter halfof the nineteenth century, the question of what was "healthy" yet womanly became even more difficult as a result of the intensifying national debate about "the Woman Question". Many historians have claimed that women health reformers provided a uniformly feminist challenge to "misogynistic" assumptions about women's nature …