Classrooms and Clinics

Classrooms and Clinics is the first book-length assessment of the development of public school health policies from the late nineteenth century through the early years of the Great Depression. Richard A. Meckel examines the efforts of early twentieth-century child health care advocates and reformers to utilize urban schools to deliver health care services to socioeconomically disadvantaged and medically underserved children in the primary grades. Their goal, Meckel shows, was to improve the children's health and thereby improve their academic performance. Meckel situates these efforts within a larger late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century public discourse relating to schools and schooling, especially in cities and towns, to child health. He describes and explains how that discourse and the hygiene movement it inspired served as critical sites for the constructive negotiation of the nature and extent of the public school's - and by extension the state's - responsibility for protecting and promoting the physical and mental health of the children for whom it was providing a compulsory education. -- from back cover.