January 25, 2008

You Are What You Teach

By DON TROOP

Last spring, when she proposed teaching a course on childbirth in early Maryland, Catherine Rogers Arthur was, by coincidence, trying to get pregnant.

So it was not exactly a surprise last fall when Ms. Arthur, curator of the Johns Hopkins University's Homewood Museum, found herself in the happy, if oddly personal, situation of being a 21st-century mother-to-be teaching an undergraduate seminar on pregnancy in the 19th century.

Ms. Arthur, whose due date is February 20, put the