Bethany L. Johnson & Margaret M. Quinlan's "You're Doing it Wrong!"

Bethany L. Johnson is an instructor in history and an associate member to the graduate faculty and research affiliate faculty in the department of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Margaret M. Quinlan is an associate professor of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, You're Doing it Wrong!: Mothering, Media, and Medical Expertise, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the cover page to one of four sections of our book:

P A R T III

THE POSTPARTUM PERIOD

The “Fourth Trimester”

So while it is representative of the framework we use within the book, "the life cycle of early motherhood" and references the postpartum section of this cycle, it is only suggestive of this framework if the reader has some familiarity with the text. Otherwise, all it states is what comes next.

Part Three addresses the postpartum period or the “fourth trimester.” Chapter 5, “‘One of the Most Curious Charities in the World’: Infant Incubation as Sideshow and/or Medical Specialty” focuses on “Dr.” Martin Couney, a turn-of-the-20th-century practitioner who cared for premature babies in incubators at Coney Island and various World Fairs (1900s-1940s). His pronouncements on mothering illuminate the power of technical expertise in defining the life-cycle of early motherhood in early 20th-century print media. We analyze Couney’s recent resurgence as a social media sensation and debunk him as a “maverick” among technical experts. Finally, we explore the ways the Couney myth complicates or obfuscates the experiences of NICU parents today. In Chapter 6, “Not Just Baby Blues: Historical Realities and Social Media Accounts of Postpartum Care Today,” we interrogate how late 19th- and early 20th-century (no-cost) postpartum care through in and out-patient programs compare with present-day postpartum care. Collected data allowed us to analyze social media accounts of support desired (by mothers) and support received in the first six weeks after birth (e.g., news stories, tweets, blogs) for comparison to historical patient records. We discover that the comparison is not between systems of postpartum care in particular contexts, it is a juxtaposition between healthcare and the absence of healthcare.

Learn more about You're Doing it Wrong! at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue