The untold story of Boston’s Floating Hospital and the nurses whose work redefined infant care

In late nineteenth-century Boston, nearly one in five babies did not survive infancy. Each summer, outbreaks of “summer complaint”—a deadly gastrointestinal illness caused by contaminated cow’s milk—swept through the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Infants born to immigrant families were especially vulnerable, trapped in stifling tenements with poor sanitation and little access to safe nutrition. Searching for a solution, reform-minded Bostonians looked to New York City’s hospital boats, which offered sick children relief from the heat. In the summer of 1894, Boston launched its own bold experiment: the Boston Floating Hospital.

What began as a modest charitable venture in Boston Harbor soon transformed pediatric care. While physicians have long received credit for the Floating Hospital’s success in reducing infant mortality, Harbor of Hope tells a deeper story. Historian Arlene W. Keeling reveals the essential and often overlooked role of nurses. It was nurses who translated medical theory into lifesaving practice: feeding and bathing fragile infants, administering treatments, calming anxious mothers, and carefully observing each child’s response. Serving as the vital link between doctors and families, they became the heart of the Floating Hospital’s mission.

Tracing the hospital’s story from its first voyage to its tragic destruction by fire in 1927, Harbor of Hope situates these nurses within a city undergoing dramatic change. Against the backdrop of rapid industrial growth, mass immigration, and emerging movements in public health and social reform, Keeling shows how skill, compassion, and persistence reshaped the fate of Boston’s most vulnerable children. Set afloat on Boston Harbor, this is a powerful story of caregiving, innovation, and the women who fought day after day to save babies’ lives.

Black communities in America have a long history of constructing sanctuaries amid oppression, from the secret hush harbors of slavery to the digital refuges created in response to the resurgence of white supremacist violence in the Trump era. These havens have offered places to grieve and to gather, to imagine freedom when the world denied it, and to practice care and resistance in the face of constant danger. They remind us that even in the darkest moments, Black people have made space to grieve, rest, heal, strategize, and imagine new futures.

In Hush to Harbor traces this enduring sanctuary-making through both historical memory and contemporary expression from the legacy of Freedmen’s Towns and Green Books for Motorists in the Jim Crow era as testaments to Black mobility and mutual protection to present-day digital activism and grassroots organizing that reimagine safety in the public sphere. 

Blending literary criticism, cultural history, and ethnography, Scott demonstrates that sanctuary is not merely a place of retreat but a political and spiritual practice that calls forth a collective act of making space when none is offered. In Hush to Harbor offers not just a chronicle of survival but a blueprint for sustaining Black refuge in a time of urgent need, redefining what it means to be safe in a nation that has never guaranteed safety for Black life.

How do poor Black communities co-exist with downtown revitalization? How do Black social movements respond to urban renewal to ensure access to better housing and city spaces? John Tilghman investigates these interlocking questions in Jim Crow from the Harbor. Looking at Baltimore, Maryland’s redevelopment in the post-war era of deindustrialization and population decline through white flight, Tilghman tells the story of how Black activists clashed with urban regimes.

Tilghman follows the money—redevelopment profits—which created tensions that prompted anti-freeway campaigns and affirmative action efforts. Through grassroots activism, protests, and community building, participants in the Black Freedom Struggle undermined downtown interests’ efforts to reinforce racial segregation as well as other civil, political, and economic inequalities.

While their efforts met with both success and limitations, Tilghman emphasizes the strengths of this minority majority population as they strove for urban equality. Jim Crow from the Harbor provides a new perspective that helps explain what has provoked today’s struggles in Baltimore for Black Americans.

In the series Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy