Health and the Modern Home [Paperback]

Health and the Modern Homeexplores shifting and contentious debates about the impact of the domestic environment on health in the modern period. Drawing on recent scholarship, contributors expose the socio-political context in which the physical and emotional environment of the modern home and family became implicated in the maintenance of health and in the aetiology and pathogenesis of diverse psychological and physical conditions. In addition, they critically analyze the manner in which the expression and articulation of medical concerns about the domestic environment served to legitimate particular political and ideological positions.

1. `Home sweet home: historical perspectives on health and the home, Mark Jackson  Part One Emotional health and the home  2. `A Bill of Divorcement: theatrical and cinematic portrayals of mental and marital breakdown in a dysfunctional upper-middle-class family, 1921-31, Michael J. Clark  3. Desperate housewives and model amoebae: the invention of suburban neurosis in inter-war Britain, Rhodri Hayward  4. Anne Sextons poetics of the suburbs, Jo Gill  5. Housewives, neuroses and the domestic environment in Britain, 1945-70, Ali Haggett  6. `I thought you would want to come and see his home: child guidance and psychiatric social work in inter-war period Britain, John Stewart  7. Rabbits and rebels: the medicalisation of maladjusted children in mid-twentieth-century Britain, Sarah Hayes  8. `Allergy con amore: psychosomatic medicine and the `asthmogenic home in the mid-twentieth century, Mark Jackson  Part Two Housing, health and home  9. `Skeletons in the medicine closet: women and `rational consumption in the inter-war American home, Nancy Tomes  10. The home fires: heat, health and atmospheric pollution in Britain, 1900-45, Stephen MosllcR