Love at Goon Park by Deborah Blum

free of fear will try to eliminate fear from her own life.” Watson equated baby love with pleasure, brought on by stroking and touch. But he also believed that
too much such affection would soften the moral fiber of the children. So did the Minnesota group. Their manual states that although ignoring and being indifferent to a child could cause problems, it was “a less insidious form of trouble than the over-dependence brought about by too great a display of affection.”
    It was serendipity, it was timing—the ideas fit together like perfectly formed pieces of a puzzle. Medicine reinforced psychology; psychology supported medicine. All of it, the lurking fears of infection, the saving graces of hygiene, the fears of ruining a child by affection, the selling of science, the desire of parents to learn from the experts, all came together to create one of the chilliest possible periods in childrearing. “Conscientious mothers often ask the doctor whether it is proper to fondle the baby,” wrote an exasperated pediatrician in the late 1930s. “They have a vague feeling that it is wrong for babies to be mothered, loved, rocked and that it is their forlorn duty to raise their children in splendid isolation, ‘untouched by human hands’ so to speak and wrapped in cellophane like those boxes of crackers we purchase.”
    Oh, they were definitely saving children. In 1931, Brenneman reported that his hospital in Chicago was averaging about 30 percent mortality in the children’s wards rather than 100 percent. Yet the youngest children, the most fragile, were still dying in the hospitals when they shouldn’t. They were coming in to those spotlessly hygienic rooms and inexplicably fading away. At Children’s Memorial, babies were dying seven times faster than the older children; they accounted for much of that stubborn 30 percent mortality. Brenneman also noted that babies who did best in the hospital were those who were “the nurses’ pets,” those who enjoyed a little extra cuddling, despite hospital rules. Sometimes the hospital could turn an illness around, he said, by asking a nurse to “mother” a child, just a little.
    New York pediatrician Harry Bakwin had come up with a description for small children in hospital wards. He titled his paper on isolation procedures “Loneliness in Infants.” French researchers had
begun to suggest that the total “absence of mothering” might be a problem in hospitals. An Austrian psychologist, Katherine Wolf, had proposed that allowing a mother into a hospital ward could improve an infant’s survival chances. She insisted that there might be actual risk from “the best equipped and most hygienic institutions, which succeeded in sterilizing the surroundings of the child from germs but which at the same time sterilized the child’s psyche.” Did this make sense? Absolutely—today. At the time, absolutely not.
    Hadn’t psychology declared that children didn’t need affection and mothering? Why would anyone even consider the notion that hygiene and that wonderfully sterile environment might be dangerous to a child? The idea was just silly; so silly, so ridiculous, so trivial, in fact, that the field of psychology pretty much ignored Wolf, Bakwin, Brenneman, and the whole idea. Years later, British psychiatrist John Bowlby went hunting for studies of the relationship between maternal care and mental health. He could find only five papers from the 1920s in any European or American research journal. He could find only twenty-two from the 1930s. What he found instead were thousands of papers on troubled children—on delinquent children, children born out of wedlock, homeless children, neglected children. Neglect, as it turned out, bred neglect beautifully. As one physician wrote, “The baby who is neglected does in course of time adjust itself to the unfortunate environment. Such babies