Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing Moves ...

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4 Bates Nursing History Center Welcomes New Faculty Member This past September, one of our Bates Center graduates, Cynthia A. Connolly, PhD, RN, joined the School of Nursing faculty as an Associate Professor of Nursing. Dr. Connolly comes to the School of Nursing with an impressive resume. She was awarded a PhD in 1999 and a Bachelors degree in 1980 from the University of Pennsylvania, School of Nursing, and received a masters degree in Primary Care and School Health from the University of Rochester in 1987. Dr. Connolly completed a two year Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia University’s Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health in 2003. Her postdoctoral training at Columbia was enhanced by a fellowship in the United States Senate with the late Senator Paul Wellstone [D-Minnesota]. There, she placed contemporary health care issues into historical context for current legislative action. She joined Yale’s faculty in 2003 as an Assistant Professor at the School of Nursing and in the History of Medicine program at the medical school. Prior to her appointment at Yale, and upon completion of her doctoral studies, Dr. Connolly taught at Penn Nursing first as a Lecturer then as an Adjunct Assistant Professor. Dr. Connolly has achieved national and international recognition for her research analyzing the forces that have shaped children’s health care delivery and family policy in the United States. She is particularly interested in the evolution of pediatric medical and nursing practice as well as the way in which illness has been experienced over time by children and families. Her work provides insight into the intellectual foundations of nursing, particularly early twentieth century nursing care of children. It yields new information concerning the ways in which the identification and assessment of risk factors is highly culturally dependent and subject to the biases of the evaluators and of the predominant culture, and analyzes the legacy of past politics in current health and social welfare policies. Dr. Connolly recently completed a project focusing on a unique early twentieth century intervention, the preventorium. Her research on the tuberculosis preventorium was published in 2008 in her book: Saving Sickly Children: The Dr. Cynthia Connolly. Photo by Felice Macera Tuberculosis Preventorium in American Life, 1909–1970, which was awarded the 2008 prestigious Lavinia L. Dock Award for Exemplary Historical Research and Writing. Her current research project focuses on a history of children and the pharmaceutical industry in the United States. Dr. Connolly has received high marks for teaching pre-professional clinical courses in pediatric nursing, and for the integration of nursing history in masters and doctoral courses. Of note, she was the first member of Yale’s School of Nursing to develop and teach an interdisciplinary course on children’s health in the United States, 1800-2000. Forty-five Yale students from different departments competed for 15 spots in this course. At Penn, Dr. Connolly will teach undergraduate pediatrics. Welcome back to Penn Dr. Connolly! (News from the Center, continued) Chuan-Fen Liu, Anna Alt-White, RN, Cathy Rick, Julie Sochalski, Pamela H. Mitchell, Gary Rosenthal, Cheryl Stetler, Paulette Cournoyer, Jack Needleman. “The association between nursing factors and patient mortality in the Veterans Health Administration.” Medical Care, 46:9 (2008): 938-945. Margaret Grey and Cynthia Connolly. “ ‘Coming together, keeping together, working together’: Interdisciplinary research and nursing, past, present, future.” Nursing Outlook, 56:3 (2008): 102-107. Jennifer Hobbs. “A dimensional analysis of patient-centered care, 2000- 2006.” Nursing Research, 58 (January/ February, 2009): 52-62. Mindy Zeitzer, J. Margo Brooks. “In the line of fire: Traumatic Brain injury among Iraq war veterans.” American Association of Occupational Health Nurses Journal, 56:8 (2008): 347-354. Salimah Meghani, and J. Margo Brooks. “Patient-provider race-concordance: Does it matter in improving minority patients’ health outcomes?” Ethnicity and Health, 14:1 (2009): 107- 30. A New Book Saving Sickly Children: The Tuberculosis Preventorium in American Life, 1909–1970, (Rutgers University Press, 2008) by University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing Associate Professor Cynthia Connolly (see opposite) traces the rise and fall of a distinctive American institution, the tuberculosis preventorium. This book is an outgrowth of Dr. Connolly’s doctoral dissertation, “Prevention Through Detention: The Pediatric Tuberculosis Preventorium Movement in the United States, 1909- 1951” which she completed here at Penn in 1999, and is based on research
New Book by Cynthia Connolly third of the twentieth century. During this period, it was widely recognized that African Americans suffered from poorer health and died at higher rates from infectious disease such as tuberculosis. The study aimed to unravel the complex social and environmental dynamics that resulted in this phenomenon. By the turn of the twentieth century, Philadelphia was renowned for its civically active black community. After the Civil War, the city was a hub for many newly arriving African American southern migrants. The large influx of migrants taxed the city’s already strained Bureau of Health, leaving much of the health care of African American residents to community networks existing in the black community and the private sector. Private civic associations such as the Starr Centre, the Whittier Centre, and the Phipps Institute actively worked with African American residents to improve living conditions and increase health services in the black community. Themes of racial, economic, and social inequality emerge in the study as African American residents grappled with stark inequalities in health care, shrinking labor opportunities, and inadequate housing. The study examines fundamental similarities and differences in the approaches of key civic activists and organizations addressing these pressing concerns. Private sector-community liaisons became a defining feature of heath service proviin primary source materials at the Bates Center and other repositories. The preventorium as an institution has not been widely studied. However, during the heyday of the preventorium movement, the institutions provided care to thousands of children throughout the United States. Two institutions highlighted in the book of particular interest were the Rest Haven Preventorium in San Diego and the Farmingdale Preventorium in New Jersey. The preventorium blended features of a hospital, sanatorium, and school, while endeavoring to imbue its patients with the values of an idealized middleclass home life. The institution did not treat sick children, but aimed to prevent TB in indigent youngsters considered to be “at risk.” The children typically hailed from families in which one or both parents suffered from the disease. They spent as much time as possible out of doors in camp-like settings where they received their education, meals, and education. The preventorium was popular because it offered something for everyone. When scientific revelations that most TB infection took place during the childhood years merged with the reform-oriented, child-saving ethos of early twentiethcentury America, the invention of the preventorium in 1909 seemed not just innovative, but necessary. Preventorium fundraising engendered little controversy and provided great visibility for newly founded antituberculosis organizations and for the nurses, physicians, and others who supported them. The institution addressed issues of poverty, neglect, and malnutrition in a discrete population, indigent children, who not only engendered great sympathy for their plight, but were also considered more easily influenced to change their behavior than adults. It emphasized environmental care and emphasis on “right” living. For those who worried about the growing influx of immigrants, and their potential to menace others’ health and change American society, the institution addressed the importance of a middle-class lifestyle, personal habits, diet, and values. The preventorium is emblematic of a time when pediatric health care and child welfare meshed. As a result, it provides an ideal vantage point from which to link the history of tuberculosis to that of child health and social welfare. The institution offers important lessons to contemporary policymakers and clinicians as well. The preventorium represented a response to an enduring set of issues in American society: how best to care for those who are ill; who should provide that care; how should it be subsidized when people cannot afford to pay for it themselves; and how to respond to data that suggests that some groups of people experience illness at higher rates than others. Preventorium nurses and doctors wrestled with concerns such as how best to help indigent families, what society “owes” children in terms of health and social welfare services, how much control parents should have over their own children, and who should decide what interventions are “in the best interest of the child.” The doors of the preventoria have long been shuttered and the institutions razed or converted for other uses, but the preventorium story is not over because the dilemmas their walls housed endure into the twenty-first century, and we can learn from its successes and failures. Margo Brooks Carthon Receives Doctorate In October 2008, Margo Brooks Carthon successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, No Place for the Dying: A Tale of Urban Health Work in Philadelphia’s Black Belt, 1900-1930. This study examines the poor health status of African Americans during the first (continued on page 7) Dr. J. Margo Brooks Carthon Photo: Ira Joel Sartorius 5
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Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing Moves ...

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