Pink and Blue: Gender, Culture, and the Health of Children ed. by Elena Conis, Sandra Eder and Aimee Medeiros

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pink and Blue: Gender, Culture, and the Health of Children ed. by Elena Conis, Sandra Eder and Aimee Medeiros Lynne Curry Elena Conis, Sandra Eder, and Aimee Medeiros, eds. Pink and Blue: Gender, Culture, and the Health of Children. Critical Issues in Health and Medicine. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2021. x + 224 pp. Ill. $32.95 (978-1-9788-0984-0). The eleven essays comprising this collection explore myriad ways in which cultural constructions of gender shaped, and were shaped by, children’s medical care in the twentieth-century United States. In the Introduction, Aimee Medeiros and Elena Conis argue that modern understandings of gender and the medical specialty of pediatrics emerged at the same historical moment in the nineteenth century and subsequently “came of age” together over the course of the twentieth (p. 2). More than just parallel historical developments, however, gender and pediatric medicine evolved within a dialectical relationship in which cultural understandings of gender shaped clinical practices while the growing authority of pediatrics imbued such notions with a “scientific layer of meaning” (p. 3). Presented in two sections, “Clinical Practice” and “Body Politic,” the essays cast a wide net, addressing a range of topics including nutrition and growth assessment, pediatric endocrinology, Down Syndrome, trans childhood, neonatal care, vaccines, and youth sports. The contributors employ a variety of methodologies, not all of which are strictly historical, and the essays reflect somewhat unevenly the dialectic that Medeiros and Conis posit. Nevertheless, the collection contributes substantial new evidence and insights to the picture of American pediatric medicine in the last half of the twentieth century and offers a valuable analytical model for acknowledging difference where it matters without either essentializing gender or ignoring people whose lived experience took place outside of hegemonic cultural constructs. In Chapter 1 Aimee Medeiros looks at the sex-specific, color-coded growth charts introduced by the National Center for Health Statistics and the Center for Disease Control, a change in format taken in response to the “oversaturated, [End Page 169] gendered consumer culture of the 1990s” (p. 17). Medeiros’s appraisal of the gendered fare aimed at children in that era is convincing but does not draw clear connections between the broad context of popular culture and the historical specifics of the new charts’ development. In Chapter 2 Jessica Martucci argues that mothers in the 1950s worried about their young children’s masturbation behavior despite the fact that the pediatric profession had largely dropped its own previous anxieties about the topic. Unlike their Victorian forebears, however, these mothers were anxious lest their parenting choices damage the era’s gendered notions of what constituted children’s healthy sexual development. Hughes Evans (Chapter 3) provides a sensitive examination of the ways in which the pediatric profession counseled doctors to communicate with parents regarding the institutionalization of children born with Down Syndrome in the mid-twentieth century. Evans notes that the profession advised doctors to take differing approaches in communicating to fathers and mothers but does not explore the question of whether the gender of the child factored into these recommendations. Sandra Eder’s discussion of the emergence of pediatric endocrinology in the 1950s (Chapter 4) is an enlightening account of the fundamental role the new subspecialty played in shaping cultural conceptualizations of gender as a binary until challenges fromoutside the profession began to challenge that paradigm in the 1990s. Chapter 5 follows with a compelling first-person narrative in which Jules Gill-Peterson interrogates the destructive legacy of clinicians’ pathologizing of transness, which they rooted in beliefs that a child’s gender identity was both malleable and had somehow gone wrong rather than recognizing and affirming transness as both “real and desirable” (p. 99). In the section’s final essay (Chapter 6) Christine H. Morton, Krista Sigurdson, and Jochen Profit raise the disturbing prospect that clinicians’ underlying assumptions about both gender and race may adversely affect patient outcomes in neonatal intensive care units, a crucial question which they leave unanswered. Part 2 shifts the volume’s focus to pediatricians’ involvement with public health and policy. Elena Conis (Chapter 7) examines the historical discourses surrounding mumps, a disease with “competing identities” (p. 133...