The Samuel X Radbill Lecture: Caring for the Pre-School Child

Getting care to poor and vulnerable pre-school children have long flummoxed public health reformers. These children have aged out of maternal-infant initiatives but have yet to reach the age when school based health care programs might be effective. As the United States looked to formulate its post-World War One public health agenda, reaching pre-school children took on a new urgency. Reformers looked to public health nurses, secure in their place within poor and vulnerable families, to link care of the pre-school child with new services to pregnant women.

In this paper, Patricia D’Antonio examines efforts in New York City, long a leader in public health reform. It places nurses at the center of different organizational goals, disciplinary interests, knowledge domains, and spheres of public and private responsibilities in a new-found commitment to provide health as well as illness care to mothers and their pre-school children. By moving from the optimism of the 1920s through the economic dislocations of the 1930s, it explores the possibilities and the problems inherent in a commitment to “knowledge,” “coordination,” and notions of expanded “access” as a solution to meeting the needs of pre-school children. It provides current clinicians and policy planners a frame for more deliberately considering tensions between current initiatives in both science and social justice in meeting what remains a critically important health care issue.

Tickets for this event are $10. You can register here.