Research Catalog

Title

The machine in the nursery : incubator technology and the origins of newborn intensive care / Jeffrey P. Baker.

Author

Baker, Jeffrey P.

Publication

Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

x, 247 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

• . In The Machine in the Nursery Jeffrey Baker examines the transformation that overtook the incubator after it arrived from France in the United States. He argues that the apparatus furnishes an example of how social and cultural factors can fundamentally alter the evolution of medical technology. The analysis centers on the interaction between the technology and its intended "target," the premature infant.
• In the late nineteenth century French obstetricians reported that a new medical device, the infant incubator, made possible the rearing of premature infants whose prospects until then had been nearly hopeless. The announcement set off a wave of enthusiasm that swept the United States. Hospitals opened the first premature infant nurseries, and incubator shows (complete with live infants) opened in numerous public fairs and expositions.
• Taken together, these elements enable us to understand the complex "branching' pattern that characterized development of the incubator in the early twentieth century.
• To the extent that particular medical specialists in distinct institutions and cultures saw different populations of such infants, they were bound to interpret the incubator's purpose differently. The factors of institutional, professional, and national context - along with that of gender - were of special importance in shaping physicians' attitudes.
• Yet Americans did more than adopt the incubator; they reinvented it in the process. A simple domestic warming device became a complex life-support system intended to provide a complete artificial environment for the premature infant.

Subject

• Incubators (Pediatrics) > History
• Incubators, Infant > history
• Intensive Care Units, Neonatal > history
• Intensive Care, Neonatal > history
• Neonatal intensive care > History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: Medicine and the Historiography of Technology -- Ch. 1. Between Fetus and Weakling -- Ch. 2. Tarnier's Invention -- Ch. 3. Mothers and Nurslings: The French Incubator Campaign -- Ch. 4. Technology Transfer and Transformation -- Ch. 5. Propaganda for the Preemies -- Ch. 6. The Experiment in Obstetric Neonatology -- Ch. 7. The Pediatric Revolt -- Ch. 8. The Eclipse of the Incubator -- Conclusion: A Technology That Misfired?

ISBN

0801851734 (alk. paper)

LCCN

95040320

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries