“Weak Stomachs”: Feeding Infants and Invalids in the Nineteenth Century

• In Event: Sugar, Milk, Fruit: Grounding Power in Food and Place

Abstract

Nineteenth-century cookbooks usually contained a chapter on recipes for feeding infants and invalids. Soft, liquid, and bland, these foods aimed to nourish the bodies of babies, weaning toddlers, and people with chronic illnesses or disabilities, and to keep from “overstimulating” them with dangerous spices or flavors. But what connections did nineteenth-century Americans draw between infancy, chronic illness, and disability? Was infancy an illness? Was disability infantilizing? By the turn of the twentieth century, bottle-fed babies died by the thousands from adulterated milk supplies or the contamination of impossible-to-clean “murder bottles.” As Progressive-era reformers pushed to optimize the health of white babies, their campaigns malnourished children of color, forced people with disabilities into institutions, and created an obsession with “normal” children’s growth and development that continues to this day. This paper interrogates these slippages between infancy and disability while placing the feeding of infants and invalids in the contexts of the growing fields of public health, pediatrics, and eugenics in the late nineteenth century, which also saw the marketing of the first industrially produced baby foods and racial panics over immigration, imperialism, and Jim Crow.

Author

• Carla Cevasco, Rutgers University-New Brunswick