
Senior Lecturer
Senior Lecturer
Undergraduate Research Coordinator
Phone
Education
B.A., History of Science, Harvard University, 2001
M.A., University of Pennsylvania, 2008
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2013
Research Interests
Meggie's manuscript (under contract with University of Washington Press) "Nature's Cure: The Environmental Reformation of American Children" explores why Americans vacation at the seashore, why they claim they feel better there, and how tourists lost the ability to medically explain their visceral reactions. Her book uses pediatric seashore hospitals to examine the rise the seashore as a therapeutic landscape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It examines the medical knowledge that supported physicians' prescriptions for "marine medication," why working class mothers used hospitals as vacation destinations, and what children's experiences were like at the beach. The project reveals how and why 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.
Selected Work
Meghan Crnic and Michelle C. Kondo. "Nature Rx: Reemergence of Pediatric Nature-Based Therapeutic Programs From the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries." American Journal of Public Health (2019): 1371-1378.
Meghan Crnic and Cynthia Connolly. “They Can’t Help Getting Well Here,”: Seaside Hospitals for Children in the United States, 1872-1917.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2 (Spring 2009), 220-233.
Meghan Crnic. “Better Babies: Social Engineering for ‘a better nation, a better world.” Endeavour 33(2009), 13-18.