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Rest Uneasy: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Twentieth-century America

Cowgill, Brittany M
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1439282125

Abstract Details

2015, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Arts and Sciences: History.
In 1969, Americans formally agreed that a “new” diagnosis existed: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The definition they proposed was an infant death “unexpected by history and in which a thorough post-mortem exam fails to demonstrate an adequate cause of death.” SIDS may have been a fresh moniker, but the situation it described was not. "Rest Uneasy: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Twentieth-Century America" takes SIDS as its subject of historical analysis; it is a narrative “disease biography” of the SIDS diagnosis, which has yet to receive concerted attention from historians. "Rest Uneasy" explores the shifting and often contradictory ways in which professionals, practitioners, and parents – most notably mothers – attempted to answer one pathologist’s striking question about SIDS: “how do you deal with a disease whose first and only symptom is death?” Tracing the SIDS diagnosis from its mid-century origins through the late 1900s, this dissertation investigates the processes by which SIDS became both a discrete medical enigma and a source of social anxiety construed differently over time and according to varying perspectives. Americans reconceived of the problem of sudden infant death multiple times over the course of the twentieth century. Their various approaches linked sudden infant deaths to all kinds of different causes – biological, anatomical, environmental, and social – and their ideas were consistently shaped by contemporary ideologies about motherhood, medicine, and infant care. "Rest Uneasy" shows how American women, families, and physicians continually reinvented sudden infant death and struggled together in a fraught but consequential effort to overcome SIDS.
David Stradling, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Janet Golden, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Isaac Campos-Costero, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Wendy Kline, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
513 p.
American History
sudden infant death syndrome; infant mortality; disease; pediatrics; sleep

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Cowgill, B. M. (2015). Rest Uneasy: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Twentieth-century America [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1439282125

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Cowgill, Brittany. Rest Uneasy: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Twentieth-century America. 2015. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1439282125.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Cowgill, Brittany. "Rest Uneasy: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Twentieth-century America." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1439282125

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1439282125
489
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This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.