The Medicalization of Education: A Historiographic Synthesis

Overview & Synopsis

In this article, the author described eight, distinct practices through which schools were medicalized during the last decade of the 19th century and the first three decades of the 20th century. The medicalization of education was summarized in expanding definitions of educational hygiene, encompassing mental, neoscholastic, physical, and school hygiene by the mid-1910s. The author argued that in the aggregate, histories of the medicalization of education account somewhat for the diversification of educational hygiene but individually are incomplete in that they fail to account for articulation of its practices. The author offered a historiographic synthesis and demonstrated that the medicalization of education was material inasmuch as it was ideological. By providing a detailed narrative of interdependencies between the allopathic medicine and education, the author suggested that the medicalization of education was basically a historical accomplishment established on contingencies. This historiographic synthesis should leave little doubt that this practice has a deep and complex history that demands sustained attention. Larger historical and moral problems are how and why allopathic physicians won school privileges and rights over a variety of alternative practitioners contesting access to the body, minds, and souls of students. (Contains 1 figure and 42 footnotes.)