Preliminary Programme

This paper examines the concept of children’s ‘convalescent’ hospitals in the United States using Sea Breeze, a maritime hospital adjacent to New York City, as a case study. In 1903, one of New York City’s largest private charities, the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP), decided that the lack of care for indigent tubercular children had reached the level of a crisis. No one knew exactly how many children were at risk, although a prominent New York City bacteriologist and Health Department officer suggested that the city’s tenement districts housed 40,000 children infected with TB. Drawing on the principles underpinning the French maritime hospital, Berck-Sur Mer, Sea Breeze opened in 1904.

Founded with twin missions of moral uplift and medical care for indigent tubercular children, the AICP Board as well as Sea Breeze’s nurses and physicians asserted that the institutions provided the ideal setting for children with bony or glandular TB to recover. In addition to the nutritional support, immobilization and surgery considered state-of-the-art treatment for TB in this era, therapy also included a highly structured program of physical, mental, and moral treatment, all provided out of doors on a beach. The AICP Board soon convinced municipal officials to contribute to Sea Breeze’s operations and the institution became recognized as a model voluntary and public partnership. After World War I the incidence of bony and glandular TB in children declined dramatically. Sea Breeze, now renamed Neponsit Beach hospital, began accepting children with chronic diseases in addition to caring for children with TB, a mission it continued until the institution closed in 1943.

Primary sources for this project include AICP annual reports, newspaper articles, and published observations by Sea Breeze physicians and nurses. A central theme of this paper is that the child health crisis that precipitated the perceived need for Sea Breeze and the deeply embedded assumptions about class, race, and ethnicity that undergirded the institution have not been fully confronted by American policymakers. I also argue that historians of medicine and nursing have neglected the nuanced changes to institutional function as well as the complex clinical and professional negotiations resulting from the transformation of the health care delivery system over the course of the twentieth century from infectious diseases to non-infectious acute and chronic illnesses by the 1960s. (Show less)

In the summer of 1872, a small group of Atlantic City’s summer residents – ladies and gentlemen of Philadelphia – established a new children’s hospital: the Children’s Seashore House (CSSH). The idea for the CSSH was born after one gentleman read “Sea-Air and Sea-Bathing for Children and Invalids,” a book by French physician André Brochard that detailed the health benefits of the seashore for sick children. Established “for the reception and treatment of invalid children of both sexes, without regard to creed, color, or nationality,” or ability to pay, the CSSH admitted children who would benefit from a respite by the sea, such as those suffering from non-contagious disease like cholera infantum, Potts disease, and scrofula. The CSSH was considered a great success, with the resident physician labeling the vast majority of the patients as either “cured” or “improved” upon discharge.

The CSSH provides a lens into changing medical, scientific, and popular understandings of urban children’s health and the environment between 1870 and 1930. During this period in the United States, philanthropists and religious organizations founded institutions such as the New York Floating Hospital (1866), CSSH (1872), Philadelphia Sanitarium Playground (1877), and Boston Floating Hospital (1894), which removed indigent children from unhealthy, urban environments to the salubrious nature of the seaside. Using primary documents including annual reports for the CSSH, newspaper articles, conference proceedings, and medical journal articles and publications, this paper examines the scientific and medical knowledge production regarding the effects of the seashore on children’s bodies and health. I consider how the success of institutions, like the CSSH, incorporated and contributed to medical understandings of disease and the environment, particularly in the fields of medical climatology, heliotherapy, and for specific diseases such as tuberculosis and rickets. Using the CSSH as a case study, this paper demonstrates the significance of environmental understandings of children’s health at the turn of the 20th century, particularly in response to the rapid societal changes, including immigration, industrialization, and urbanization, that marked the Progressive Era. (Show less)

Between 1878 and 1884 Belgium’s educational policy struggled with its first school funding controversy. When Belgium became an independent country in 1830, the Belgian state decided not to organize education and schooling itself, but entrusted this task to the Catholic Church. The Law of 1842 on the organisation of primary schools in Belgium more or less consolidated this situation. However, in 1879, the Liberal government adopted a law, which stated that all state primary schools had to become neutral schools. According to this law, every city or municipality had to build up its own school. In these schools it was forbidden to teach religious education and all teachers were asked to get a teacher training degree from a state teacher training college. For six years, there will be a hard struggle between Liberals and Catholics in trying to convince the people about the strength and the importance of their own educational system. In 1884, the Catholic Party won the elections. As a result, a law that showed many similarities with the Law of 1842 replaced the Law of 1879.

Up until now, the history of sea hospitals and sanatoria has especially been studied from a medical and clinical perspective, paying attention to e.g. the history of medical treatments. In this paper, the history of sea hospitals will be analysed from an educational and ideological perspective. More specifically, the focus will be on the history of l’Hôpital Maritime Roger de Grimberghe in Middelkerke, a little city near the Belgian coast. The General Council of the Civil Hospices of Brussels built this sea hospital in 1884. The hospitals main task consisted of taking in needy children from the Brussels region who suffered from rickets (a bone disease better known as rickets) or scrofulosis (inflammation of the lymph glands). The children were sent to the hospice by the municipal government and the local authority bore the cost of these children’s stay.

In this paper we especially pay attention to the discussion about schooling in the sea hospital Roger de Grimberghe against the background of the first school funding controversy. A remarkable feature of this Belgian sea hospital was that the children were not schooled. Compared to e.g. the sea hospitals of Berck-sur-Mer in France, which were regarded as the main example for the Belgian initiative, for about 20 years, all schooling was prohibited. While doctor Casse was leading the hospice, no schooling was given. It is not until 1901, briefly after the appointment of Gustave Gevaert, the successor of Casse, that the General Council takes the organisation of schooling in the hospice to heart, though it got during the first years several opportunities to organise schooling in the hospital. The paper draws upon records of the General Council of the Civil Hospices of Brussels, the Episcopacy of Western Flanders and newspaper accounts. (Show less)