Health in the City

Utilizing a rich array of health records and medical documents from nurses, physicians, and social workers, Tanya Hart provides a critical analysis of health care in New York City from 1915 to 1930. ~American Historical Review

At the turn of the twentieth century, black and white women migrated to New York City, a new place and environment swirling with ideas and practices of race, racism, germ theory and sanitation. Health in the City tells us the very human story of how pioneering, yet racialized health care thinking and services complicated the meaning of these womens motherhood as well as their own health and welfare. Harts discovery and analysis of previously untapped archival records, offers an important narrative and reveals a remarkable mastery of historical methods that are a model of interdisciplinary sociohistorical research. ~Jennifer Hamer,University of Kansas

In its rigorous and interdisciplinary examination of the intersections of gender, maternalist health politics, and ethnicity, Health in the City makes an impressive and appreciable contribution to a robust field. Drawing on historical, literary, and social scientific methods, Tanya Hart gives us the entire landscape of health, including vocational opportunity, nutritional concerns, housing, tuberculosis and other communicable diseases, child health, and the social inequalities which influenced all. Moving throughout this landscape we find physicians, health officials, midwives, social workers and charity agents, and, most importantly, the African-American, West Indian, and Italian women who sought not only health, but medical citizenship. ~Samuel Roberts,Columbia University

This original and provocative volume reflects the authors admirable mastery of historical archival research, combined with an artful command of works in literary and culture studies. . . . Health in the City is a richly textured, well-researched, persuasively argued, and engagingly written text. ~Darlene Clark Hine,Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies, Northwestern University

Harts book offers important insights into the gendered and racialized notions of health and citizenship that animated public health programs in the early decades of the twentieth century and the attitudes and beliefs of the women who experienced these efforts. ~Journal of the History of Medicine and Science

[] Harts book offers important insights into the gendered and racialized notions of health and citizenship that animated public health programs in the early decades of the twentieth century and the attitudes and beliefs of the women who experienced these efforts. ~Journal of the History of Medicine

Drawing on the associations archival papers, Hart exposes gaps between published and unpublished data, and she provides valuable close analysis of the public work and private debates of a charitable organization working at the intersection of statistics, public policy, and health care. ~Journal of American History

In illuminating the delivery of (and response to) racialized and culturally insensitive health care to women in two immigrant communities in New York City,Health in the Cityadds to a growing literature on the history of health and medicine. ~Social History of Medicine