What Is the Room They Put Babies in After Birth
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Sixteen minutes into the 2nd episode of Hulu'southward newHandmaid's Tale, Offred (Elizabeth Moss), having recently given nativity to her starting time child, follows a nurse to the hospital'due south newborn nursery, where her babe will have her first bath. Arriving at the nursery, Offred is taken aback by an unusual sight.
"Where are the babies?" she asks.
"Oh, nosotros had a hard dark. Two went to the intensive intendance unit, and the others all take died."
The photographic camera zooms in on Offred every bit she looks in through a massive window into a newborn nursery with three rows of empty bassinets. Ominous music plays in the background. The scene serves as a bad omen of things to come for a customs grappling with widespread infertility. AsHandmaid's' creative squad understands, an empty nursery is jarring. That viewers of all ages and life experience tin hands recognize the gravity of a nursery devoid of babies speaks to the peculiar and particular role that nursery windows have played in modern American hospitals.
Newborn nurseries became fixtures of American hospitals in the early twentieth century, during the transition from home to hospital every bit the preferred and default place to give birth. When hospitals built new maternity units to house women during labor, commitment, and recovery, they also built split nurseries where newborns were cared for, en masse, apart from their mothers.
These nurseries all shared a hit similarity: they prominently featured large windows facing out to hospital corridors. These windows placed the hospitals' youngest patients on display for family, friends, hospital staff, and members of the general community. The 1943 edition ofStandards and Recommendations for Hospital Care of Newborn Infants, first published equally a collaboration between the American Academy of Pediatrics and The Children'southward Bureau, prescribed that "A viewing window should be provided between each nursery and the nurses' station, and one between each nursery and the corridor so that relatives may see the infants without coming in contact with them."
The stated purpose for the viewing window was twofold: first, the window allows relatives to "see the infants," and 2d, the window serves as a bulwark to prevent contact between relatives and the newborns they have come to see. But while hospitals justified the construction of these windows every bit sanitary barriers between newborns and the general hospital community, it's unlikely that infection prevention was a main motivator. If windows served mainly as antibacterial barriers, the hospitals would have had no reason to install them in the first place; standard windowless walls surrounding nurseries would have been less trouble to build, and would have eliminated the potential for compromising the bulwark between the nursery and the corridor via cracks between the window and the wall. Thus, the ubiquitous nursery window served a primarily social function.
Roots for the practice of clinical babe viewing may lie in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European and American tradition of incubator shows, which placed premature and otherwise weak infants on display in both permanent and traveling exhibitions. In the United States, incubator shows charged admission and displayed sick infants amongst "ethnic villages and freak shows," most famously on New York'due south Coney Island.
Of class, unlike incubator shows, newborn nurseries were spaces for the provision of clinical care—not for entertainment—and were widely accepted and endorsed past mainstream medical organizations. Most importantly, the babies displayed in the windows of newborn nurseries were well-nigh always salubrious. These windows were, at their cadre, displays of happy, good for you, and hopeful normalcy.
While large picture windows often displayed the swaddled newborns to all who passed through hospitals' corridors, some nurseries had specific times in the twenty-four hours reserved for family members and friends to get a closer look at a particular infant. During these more intimate viewings, a nurse would often hold a newborn up to the window so that the eager observer could get a closer wait. Admirers in this scenario could be mothers, grandparents, members of the extended family unit, or adoptive parents, merely appear to accept most frequently been fathers. For most of the twentieth century, fathers did non meet their babies in person until they took them dwelling house, and hospitals seem to have had fathers' desires in mind when designing nursery windows. A 1950 article inThe American Journal of Nursing reported on an innovative recessed nursery window installed in a hospital in California, which they called a "Baby Showcase." This window, they wrote, "is paying dividends in public relations value and making new fathers very much happier…"
The epitome of a father coming together his newborn through a pane of glass likewise appears in countless family photographs from the mid-twentieth century, and was immortalized in all forms, from fine art to advertising. A full-folio advertizement for The Prudential Insurance Company of America in a 1943 issue ofLIFE mag uses the archetype plant nursery window interaction between begetter, nurse, and infant to convince new fathers to purchase life insurance. The folio features a large photograph of a handsome boyfriend, dressed in a suit and tie, grinning into the optics of his newborn child through a glass window. The infant is in the artillery of a nurse, who cradles the baby, tilting the child towards its father. The photograph's caption reads, "Motion-picture show OF A Human being LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE," and beneath the tagline: "Row upon row of tiny bassinets – and a nurse holding up a new baby.The baby! But Dad sees much more than a newborn son. He sees a long future stretching ahead…"
Today, newborn nurseries are no longer considered best practice in American hospitals, and their use is disappearing thanks in part to the widespread adoption of the WHO'south 1991 Babe-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI). The BFHI, a global program to promote hospital practices that encourage breastfeeding, includes keeping healthy mother-infant pairs together. As nurseries take begun closing, popular printing coverage and professional discussions take reinforced the idea of the nursery window equally a positive space in hospitals, both for babies' families and unrelated members of the community.
In 2002,The American Journal of Maternal and Child Nursing printed a argue on the topic of endmost the plant nursery windows. Dotti James, PhD, RN, argued for keeping the windows open, in part because for "family unit members, friends, and others… Seeing one of these picayune miracles engenders smiles and becomes a bright spot in the twenty-four hour period." James also noted that, "in some hospitals the nursery window has become a destination for patients and families from other parts of the hospital experiencing a health crisis," and that "Continuing exterior the plant nursery, seeing the babies who have their lives before them can requite hope to families trying to cope."
Likewise in 2002, aLos Angeles Times article echoed James' arguments, lamenting the closure of "the popular viewing areas, where hospital visitors encumbered past some of life'due south darkest moments could brighten their day a little simply past peering through the plant nursery window." In the same piece, Michael Baskt, executive managing director of Community Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles, shared, "… For people where things are non going well, we recognize they would be attracted by the beauty of nascence.Sometimes people demand to get from the sad, depressing side of the hospital to the happy side. Babies put things in perspective."
Every bit influential thinkers and organizations continue to reimagine the postpartum menstruation equally a time for breastfeeding, clinically-managed bonding, and a jump start on developing the "right" mothering habits, the iconic brandish of newborns continues. For better or for worse, whether in hospital-published "online nurseries," or as the backdrop for emotional scenes in telly and movies, the tradition of the nursery window seems to exist here to stay.
This story was originally published on NursingClio , a collaborative blog project that ties historical scholarship to present-day issues related to gender and medicine.
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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-hospitals-started-displaying-newborn-babies-through-windows-180964186/
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