Description
Trade Review"Historians of children’s health and school hygiene have eagerly awaited this work, and
Classrooms and Clinics does not disappoint. Meckel covers a tremendous range of topics, but the narrative is clearly focused and the argument carefully developed.
Classrooms and Clinics is sure to stimulate a wealth of new scholarship on the history of schoolchildren’s health." * Social History of Medicine *
"Meckel demonstrates that government and medical authorities contested the claim that because the state mandates education, it bears a concomitant responsibility for student health. This is an excellent history into herto uncharted territory, accompanied by supurb notes and index. Highly recommended."
* Choice *
"Beautifully written and impressively researched,
Classrooms and Clinics is a major contribution to the history of education, medicine, and public health policy. It deserves a wide readership as Americans continue to debate public versus private responsibility for health care and the welfare of urban school children." * American Historical Review *
"This detailed, careful, and extensively researched analysis of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century debates related to school hygiene, and the expansion and contraction of school health services that followed them, provides a helpful and arguably essential framework for current debates about the role of the urban schools in the improvement of children’s health (p. 206). Hopefully, the book will find an audience not only within but also beyond academia, among today's child advocates, policy makers, and educators." * History of Education Quarterly *
"
Classroom and Clinics reveals how the subtleties of disagreement over issues of individual versus governmental responsibility and the dividing line between preventive and therapeutic services resulted in the abandonment of a movement to put clinics in schools. Meckel’s meticulous research and sophisticated analysis challenges scholars of this period to rethink their characterizations of the contours of reform." * Journal of American History *
"A valuable contribution to the histories of American education, childhood and youth, public health, and the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. By examining the discourse of urban school hygiene, Meckel demonstrates the enduring nature of tensions between the state's obligations to schoolchildren and the rights and responsibilities of parents." * Journal of the History of Children and Youth *
"This book adds an important dimension to our understanding of children’s health and the contested role of the state in providing health services to needy populations. Meckel illuminates the sometimes promising, sometimes disappointing evolution of school health in America during a critical period of growing public institutions, philanthropies, and private entities." -- Alexandra Minna Stern * University of Michigan *
"This is the first comprehensive history of public school hygiene in the United States. Meckel skillfully traces the origins and evolution of school health programs and their troubled legacy today." -- Heather Munro Prescott * author of Student Bodies: The Influence of Student Health in American Society and Medicine *
Table of Contents Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Going to School, Getting Sick: Mass Education and the Construction of School Diseases
2. Incubators of Epidemics: Contagious Disease and the Origins of Medical Inspection
3. Defective Children, Defective Students: Medicalizing Academic Failure
4. Building Up the Malnourished, the Weakly, and the Vulnerable: Penny Lunches and Open-Air Schools
5. From Coercion to Clinics: The Contested Quest to Ensure Treatment
6. The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Expansion and Reorientation in the Postwar Era
Epilogue: Contraction, Renovation, and Revival
Notes
Index
