A ubiquitous element of our modern-day bathrooms, the medicine cabinet is also one of the home’s most particularized containers—stocked with substances and technologies used in healthcare and grooming, it functions both as personal pharmacy and private salon. Indeed, the medicine cabinet emerged across the early part of the twentieth century not just in tandem with public health policy initiatives but also, importantly, with the developing consumer market for the goods and tools of personal care. Its signature aesthetic—mirror, glass, and gleaming metal—would seem to have as much in common with the presentational seductions of the department store display case as with the sanitary spaces of the physician’s examining room.

As historian Deanna Day has written, stewardship of this container—as with so many of the domestic responsibilities associated with practices of health and bodily maintenance—has long been understood to be a task to be undertaken by women. A well-stocked and carefully curated medicine cabinet conveyed care and successful home management, while an overstuffed or unconsidered one ran afoul of received ideals of motherhood. Yet while women were responsible for the cabinet’s care and contents, certain products essential to their own health and hygiene were long thought to be inimical to it. Jeffrey Kastner spoke with Day, currently a research fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, by telephone in July 2016.

Cabinet: Tell me a bit about what led you to start looking at the history of the medicine cabinet.

Deanna Day: I’m a historian of science, and I study the history of technology and the history of medicine. Quite early on as a graduate student, I began to focus my research on consumer medical technologies because I was less interested in what doctors were doing and more interested in how regular people have thought about and cared for their health. I wrote my dissertation on the history of the thermometer as a medical technology that, particularly during the twentieth century, was mostly used in the home by women—both to take care of children and also to chart their fertility. In the process of researching that history, I came across a few interesting sources on the development of the medicine cabinet, which was this truly iconic container designed to hold the types of quasi-medical objects that I was interested in: objects that were partly medical, but also that were partly cosmetic and not thought of as particularly “high tech.” For instance, people would be instructed to keep the thermometer in their medicine cabinet, but also things like razors and toothbrushes and other little technologies that were at least as much about grooming as about health. As I began to look into the history of the cabinet as a container, I discovered that it developed very much in parallel with these kinds of technologies. In fact, collecting these technologies together in the same cabinet helped to create the idea that these domestic technologies were something of a “kind,” emphasizing that both beauty work and medical care were crucial parts of literally embodying middle-class virtue in the home. And somewhat predictably, this bodily caretaking, along with the tools used for it, came to be coded as within the realm of women.

I’ve never really considered the thermometer as a gendered technology, but thinking back on it, as a child, it was always my mother who would use it. And as you’ve written, this sort of technological gendering extends in some sense to the medicine cabinet itself.

Absolutely. In the twentieth century ideal of the American domestic space—which obviously is coded with a range of class, race, and gender implications—it’s the woman of the house who’s the person in charge of maintaining that space to certain standards of cleanliness, standards for what a healthy home was supposed to be like that were increasingly dictated by science. Because of that, women became the stewards of the medicine cabinet, in addition to being the stewards of the other spaces of the home that were about taking care of their family’s bodily needs.

The medicine cabinet qua cabinet is a relatively recent phenomenon; it didn’t really emerge until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century as the sort of artifact it is today, a box hanging on the wall. Where did a housewife keep those kinds of supplies prior to the emergence of this new piece of furniture in the bathroom?

Prior to the bathroom medicine cabinet, these kinds of medical objects and tools would most likely have been kept in the kitchen. There was a lot of overlap in terms of the tools used to prepare medicines and to prepare food, and many treatments were based on diet, on eating certain foods. As indoor home bathrooms became more common with the advent of indoor plumbing, the idea of the clean, hygienic home bathroom space emerged and quasi-medical objects began to migrate to that space. The clean indoor bathroom was a kind of larger container that helped give rise to the smaller container that held these sorts of objects.

And the bathroom also becomes a quasi-medicalized space—the aesthetic of white tile and chrome fixtures are all suggestive of institutionally hygienic environments.

Early catalogues that sold household items, like sinks and mirrors and fixtures, figured the space of the bathroom more as a space of luxury, with soft furnishings, lots of decoration, things like that. But as the germ theory of disease and the idea of scientific motherhood started to become more prominent, you start to see the aesthetic changes as well—shiny white tile, chrome fixtures, etc. You want to make it gleam so you can form an aesthetic of cleanliness as well as making sure that you have all the spaces germ-free.