1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910794922703321

Autore

Cowgill Brittany

Titolo

Rest Uneasy : Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Twentieth-­Century America / / Brittany Cowgill

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Brunswick, NJ : , : Rutgers University Press, , [2018]

©2018

ISBN

0-8135-8821-9

0-8135-8822-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (vii, 236 pages)

Collana

Critical Issues in Health and Medicine

Disciplina

618.92/026

Soggetti

History, 20th Century

Risk Reduction Behavior

Infant Mortality - history

Sudden Infant Death - prevention & control

Sudden Infant Death - etiology

Electronic books.

United States

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Introduction: Reinterpreting Sudden Infant Death: Explaining the Unexplainable -- 1. "Deaths of Infants in Bed": The Historical Origins of SIDS -- 2. Cause of Death: SIDS -- 3. The Theory of the Month Club: Conducting Research on SIDS -- 4. Risky Babies -- 5. Mobilization: SIDS Activism -- 6. Cause for Alarm -- 7. Sleep Like a Baby -- Conclusion: "The Disease of Theories": Discovering SIDS -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Tracing the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) diagnosis from its mid-century origins through the late 1900s, Rest Uneasy 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. American medicine reinterpreted and reconceived of the problem of sudden infant death multiple times over the course of the twentieth century. Its various approaches linked



sudden infant deaths to all kinds of different causes-biological, anatomical, environmental, and social. In the context of a nation increasingly skeptical, yet increasingly expectant, of medicine, Americans struggled to cope with the paradoxes of sudden infant death; they worked to admit their powerlessness to prevent SIDS even while they tried to overcome it. Brittany Cowgill chronicles and assesses Americans' fraught but consequential efforts to explain and conquer SIDS, illuminating how and why SIDS has continued to cast a shadow over doctors and parents.