Chlorosis

In 1880s, chlorosis as a disease of “capacious girls” (physically and mentally) that embraced the lifestyles of both working girls and college women and was characterized by extreme lethargy, gastric and menstrual disturbances, and blood diminution, etc. By the early 20th century, chlorosis had become for most clinicians (excepting child and adolescence developmentalists like G. Stanley Hall), “simply a less than optimal hematological state detectable by the staining of cells and their analysis under the microscope” (Wailoo I, 50). Yet, “Even in the 1890s, chlorosis was not a stable, well-defined entity. In late Victorian America chlorosis was at once a collection of changing symptoms and part of a medical rationale for the moral supervision of girls. Whatever chlorosis had meant before the 1890s, during this decade the diagnosis became intertwined with the broader goals of uplifting and morally reforming American women, and technologies of hemoglobin analysis were crucial to this agenda. . . . physicians seized upon chlorosis as a reliable disease category and as a clinical rationale for transforming capricious and ill-fed girls into models of regulated, controlled, and well-behaved young women. The monitoring of blood, appetite, and habits conferred scientific legitimacy on moral management” (Wailoo I, 20, 25). . . . Hematological accounts of women and iron gained a wide cultural currency, both within medicine and in wider circles – as some theorists sought to justify a domestic model of American womanhood in the post-World War II decades (42) . . . . I have made no universal claims about what chlorosis ‘really was.’ Rather my analysis has emphasized that it was the interaction of technologies, gender ideals, and a changing culture of medicine – that is, the culture of moral management, the culture of laboratory medicine, the promoters of iron metabolism research, or the advocates of women’s emancipation – that shaped the changing identity of chlorosis. . . . Clearly, there is no single disease called chlorosis. Technologies have played a key role in giving many different identities to this complex phenomenon” (44). By 1930s, emphasis on iron intake and iron metabolism  reconfiguring of chlorosis as “iron deficiency anemia,” which revealed much about “a particular culture of hematological thought that had grown and expanded by the middle of the twentieth century. By knitting together observations about iron metabolism, modern therapeutics, and female physiology, hematologists constructed a chlorosis that reflected the growing chauvinism of their times.” Yet, “iron was in fact, a tool of limited power in the treatment of chlorosis” (63-64).