Meghan Crnic
Lecturer, History and Sociology of Science
Undergraduate Research Coordinator, History and Sociology of Science
Education
Meggie's manuscript (in progress) "Nature's Cure: The Environmental Reformation of American Children" explores the widespread use of the seashore as a therapeutic landscape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It examines the medical, environmental, and social rationale that facilitated physicians, philanthropists, parents and children’s participation in nature-based institutions that provided medical care to indigent children living in cities at the turn of the 20th century. The project illustrates how people understood urban centers to be pathological environments and how they constructed the seashore as a space to heal, restore, and reform American children's health and bodies.