2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
along with rival organizations such as the Camp Fire Girls and the YWCA’s
Girl Reserves—promoted camping programs as the logical successors to the
Nature Study movement. Educators, whose plans to create a healthy and holistic
environment for children were thwarted by the stuffy confines of the classroom,
turned enthusiastically to the great outdoors. Camp leaders, women drawn from
the ranks of Progressive educators and social workers, created their immensely
popular programs by combining familiar classroom health charts with a rhetoric
that emphasized the special, indeed nearly magical, healing powers of nature.
On one hand girls learned that acquiring healthy habits at camp was a clinical, if
not scientific, undertaking. When they enrolled, girls received a “thorough
medical exam” upon which was based a “constructive physical program” for
the ensuing weeks. The successful completion of their individualized program,
however, rested on their own willingness to adopt a new attitude toward health.
Camp was the place where girls learned to keep the health charts that hung at
the foot of their beds, as well as “the place to acquire a scientific rather than
emotional point of view about food.” Although the possibility for round-theclock
supervision no doubt made it easier for leaders to ensure girls learned
these lessons, growth charts and “scientifically-planned menus” were not the
only things girls were meant to take home from summer camp. Far from the
classrooms they presided over during the school year, leaders tried to impress
upon their charges lessons that could only be learned from the landscape itself.
Lessons of nature were applicable to both mental and physical heath. The “hills
and valleys” that together formed the “natural beauty of camp” recalled the
“highs and lows” that all girls experienced, and which in concert formed a “wellbalanced
personality.” Likewise the camp swimming hole taught a cautionary
tale about obsession over weight. A girl needed both “strength and fat” to balance
the demands of fitness and buoyancy that would guide her safely across the
water. Girls were taught that their continued health and well-being, like that of
the nature around them, depended on the maintenance of a careful balance.
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Gregg Mitman University of Minnesota
Hay Fever Holiday: Health, Leisure, and Place in Gilded Age America
By the 1880s, hay fever had become the pride of America’s leisure class and
the base of a substantial tourist economy that catered to a culture of escape. In
mid-August, thousands of hay fever sufferers fled to the White Mountains of
New Hampshire, to the shores of Lake Superior, or to the Colorado plateau,
seeking refuge from the watery eyes, flowing nose, sneezing fits, and attacks
of asthma that developed with seasonal regularity. Through a comparative
regional analysis, this paper explores how the geography of place became
integral to the defining characteristics of hay fever resorts and the experience
of chronic illness: in the very material relationships of daily life, in the social
contours of particular regions, and in the symbolic spaces that nature inhabited.