ABSTRACT
Twentieth-century Britain was associated with an explosion of health advice. The important study of texts for women industrial workers, Vicky Long and Hilary Marland found reproductive biology playing second fiddle to hygiene, diet, exercise, recreation, fashion and beauty'. At the same time, however, literature on pregnancy and childcare proliferated, targeting professionals, 2 schoolgirls 3 and parents, especially mothers. By 1910 the chapter had disappears, much of its content being absorbed into a discussion of 'Baby's Troubles' under a section headed 'Congenital Defects'. People's analysis of the prevention and treatment of disability via parental advice literature for the period 1890 to 1980 paints a disturbing picture of the negative ways in which disabled babies were perceived with a heavy emphasis on burden, professional authority and normalization. Under authoritarian parenthood, the causes and consequences of disability were integral to the literature, confronting those predominantly middle-class parents who read it with the possibility of impairment.
