Seeking Health at the Seashore

Meggie Crnic

Wagner Free Institute of Science

Wednesday, December 2, 2020 6:30 pm EST

Online Event

WEEKNIGHTS AT THE WAGNER: Seeking Health at the Seashore an online lecture with Meggie Crnic, Ph.D.
 
When we emerged from lockdown this past Spring we rediscovered the outdoors. As beaches opened, Little League resumed, restaurants became entirely al fresco, and schools debated the merits of outdoor classrooms being outside offered a respite to pandemic-weary bodies and souls. Scientists confirmed what we felt. The outdoors, they concluded, was safer than most of our ventilated, artificially warmed and cooled interior environments.
 
These ideas are not new. Just over a century ago physicians, public health officials, and every day citizens knew that environments like the seashore, mountains, and even urban parks operated as tonics to deleterious urban centers. This medical fact was true regardless whether there was an epidemic that threatened cities. This talk examines how beach towns including Atlantic City, NJ and Coney Island, NY became used as salubrious sites by physicians and families alike. It explains how doctors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries built a system of medical knowledge that supported what they and their patients’ intrinsically understood – that being at the beach made them feel better and could cure disease. We will learn that many of our contemporary beach-going activities have a basis in health-seeking practices that began over a century ago.
 
About the Professor: Dr. Meggie Crnic is a historian of medicine, the environment, and children’s history. She received her Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. She teaches at Penn and Columbia Universities; her courses include Bioethics and its history, the History of Medicine, and Race and Medicine in America. She is in the final stages of her book manuscript, Nature’s Cure: American Families at the Beach, 1870-1930, which explores nature prescriptions and health-seeking practices that gave rise to beach tourism as we know it today.