Rest Uneasy

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Twentieth-Century America

By Brittany Cowgill

SERIES: Critical Issues in Health and Medicine

Rutgers University Press

Tracing the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) diagnosis from its mid-century origins through the late 1900s, Rest Uneasy investigates the processes by which SIDS became both a discrete medical enigma and a source of social anxiety construed differently over time and according to varying perspectives. American medicine reinterpreted and reconceived of the problem of sudden infant death multiple times over the course of the twentieth century. Its various approaches linked sudden infant deaths to all kinds of different causes—biological, anatomical, environmental, and social. In the context of a nation increasingly skeptical, yet increasingly expectant, of medicine, Americans struggled to cope with the paradoxes of sudden infant death; they worked to admit their powerlessness to prevent SIDS even while they tried to overcome it. Brittany Cowgill chronicles and assesses Americans’ fraught but consequential efforts to explain and conquer SIDS, illuminating how and why SIDS has continued to cast a shadow over doctors and parents.

Rest Uneasy is an exceptionally well-written, thoroughly researched account of the identification and labeling of a medical problem and the consequences of those labels. Kathleen Jones, Virginia Tech

Cowgill illuminates the fascinating and complex history of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in the twentieth century. Her careful and detailed analysis shows why this was more than a discrete medical problem or a private family tragedy and how its meaning and interpretation changed in light of both scientific studies and cultural changes. Janet Golden, author of Babies Made Us Modern: How Infants Brought Americans into the Twentieth Century

New Scholarly Books: Weekly Book List, June 8,' by Nina C. Ayoub Chronicle of Higher Education

Book Nook: Rest Uneasy - Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Twentieth-Century America' Q&A with Brittany Cowgill Motherhood Moment

Highly recommended. Choice

Rest Uneasy is an exceptionally well-written, thoroughly researched account of the identification and labeling of a medical problem and the consequences of those labels. Kathleen Jones, Virginia Tech

Cowgill illuminates the fascinating and complex history of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in the twentieth century. Her careful and detailed analysis shows why this was more than a discrete medical problem or a private family tragedy and how its meaning and interpretation changed in light of both scientific studies and cultural changes. Janet Golden, author of Babies Made Us Modern: How Infants Brought Americans into the Twentieth Century