Heather Munro Prescott – författare

Six original essays reflect the growing scholarly interest in the history of childhood and youth, particularly issues affecting child health and welfare. These important new essays show how changing patterns of health and disease have responded to and shaped notions of childhood and adolescence as life stages.Until the early 20th century, life-threatening illnesses were a sinister presence in the lives of children of all social classes. Today, many diseases and threats to child health have been eliminated or alleviated. Yet critical problems remain. New threats such as AIDS and violence take a steady toll. Child health remains an active concern for all families. Despite the development of health care policies, social welfare policies, and effective medication, the home remains—as it was in the Colonial period—the most critical site of care. Parents are still central to the preservation of children's health. This work imposes a holistic view of this experience for children and families. By examining the child's perspective of illness, the authors make an important contribution to the understanding of illness as part of the developmental process of growing up.

Parents have known since time immemorial, and social scientists have agreed since the turn of the century, that adolescents are a people unto themselves--a "distinct developmental category." Yet it was not until the 1950s that a medical specialty specifically for teenagers came into being. In this book, Heather Munro Prescott shows how the mid-twentieth-century emergence of adolescent medicine resulted from a combination of social changes that reached far beyond the field of medicine--changes that placed teenagers themselves at the center of the national agenda.The first book to trace the history of adolescent medicine, A Doctor of Their Own draws on oral histories of physicians in the field, patient records from adolescent medical facilities, medical and popular advice literature, and letters from teenagers and their parents. Prescott examines the interplay between the emergence of adolescent medicine and changes in American family relationships, youth culture, popular perceptions about young people, and the social experience of adolescence. With special attention to the role of young people themselves in the shaping of this new discipline, her book follows the development of adolescent medicine from its origins in the work of J. Roswell Gallagher at Boston Children's Hospital in the 1950s to its uncertain prospects today, when, despite heightened recognition of their specific medical needs, most teenagers still receive inadequate health care.

Since 2006, when the “morning-after pill” Plan B was first sold over the counter, sales of emergency contraceptives have soared, becoming an $80-million industry in the United States and throughout the Western world. But emergency contraception is nothing new. It has a long and often contentious history as the subject of clashes not only between medical researchers and religious groups, but also between different factions of feminist health advocates.The Morning After tells the story of emergency contraception in America from the 1960s to the present day and, more importantly, it tells the story of the women who have used it. Side-stepping simplistic readings of these women as either radical feminist trailblazers or guinea pigs for the pharmaceutical industry, medical historian Heather Munro Prescott offers a portrait of how ordinary women participated in the development and popularization of emergency contraception, bringing a groundbreaking technology into the mainstream with the potential to alter radically reproductive health practices.