A Few Drops in the Eyes of Every Infant: Preventative Medicine, Neonatal Blindness, and Public Health in the United States, 1884-1929

Using the concept of “biomedical citizenship” as an interpretive grid, this paper analyzes the intertwined histories of the emergence of the unique character of the U.S. bureaucratic state; the complex relationship between “private” interests and “public” healthcare; epistemologies of womanhood and health; and transformations in preventative and therapeutic neonatal care. I analyze these histories alongside constructions of the healthy and disabled body. While the paper addresses knowledge-production in laboratories and legislative halls, it also features patients as actors, examining women and children as subjects and emergent consumers of care. The paper highlights a case study of the mass production, and global distribution and consumption, of a silver nitrate substance. By the 1920s, many states passed laws requiring the solution to be dropped in the eyes of all infants born in hospitals, as it prevented the transmission of gonorrhea from mother to child, which can lead to blindness if untreated. These transformations, I argue, constructed mothers and children as differential patient-citizens. Such construction was conditioned by contingent understandings of therapeutic efficacy and was inflected by the context of women’s and maternalist groups’ political activity; many of the earliest policy and institutional innovations of the U.S. welfare state were prompted in part by the actions of reform-minded women and their allies. Through the heuristic device of a pharmaceutical-therapeutic case study, my paper engages with histories of global capitalism, and the distinct character of the expanded, but qualified, role of the twentieth-century U.S. state in healthcare and the management of citizens’ bodies.