ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Constructing medical pregnancy: women, foetus, and rubella control

• In Event: Representing Pregnancy: Science and Culture in the 20th Century 3

English Abstract

Rubella disease was first described in the mid-eighteenth century, receiving the name of Röthlen and later German measles. It was considered a mild disease of little importance in human medicine until the 1940s, when it became a public health problem, especially from the 1960s. The description of the Congenital Rubella Syndrome -a series of signs appearing in some infants born to mothers diagnosed with rubella during that pregnancy, in 1941 by Norman Gregg and his proposal of an infective factor transmissible transplacentally was influent; as well as research on virus isolation in tissue culture, like poliovirus in 1949 and the rubella virus itself in 1962, confirming it as infectious agent.
In this period, a growing interest in the pregnancy process, delivery, and motherhood appeared in physicians and scientists who contributed to the construction of a medical model of motherhood, called “scientific motherhood,” that became consolidated transnationally, replicating itself from one country to another. In this process, embryonic and fetal bodies were scientifically, visually, and politically constructed as entities on their own and became a target of medical care.
This article reconstructs the process by which the rubella virus became established as a dangerous infectious agent for humans, especially the unborn, susceptible to eradication. By analyzing the scientific and medical conceptions about infectious diseases, viruses, pregnancy, and the fetus accompanying the rubella control process, I aim to identify and characterize the mutual influence between scientific and cultural representations and conceptualizations of the experience of pregnancy and motherhood, and medical gendered discourses on women.

Author

• Marta Velasco Martín, Universidad Complutense de Madrid