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“To Create a Strong and Healthy Race”: School Children in the Public Health Movement, 1880–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Neil Sutherland*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia

Extract

BETWEEN THE 1880s and the 1920s a growing band of English Canadians created and began to test a new consensus on the situation of the child in their society. In the four major dimensions of their enterprise they worked to change the nature and improve the quality of family life, to establish new systems of child and family welfare, to transform Canadian education, and to organize child and family health care. Of these reform efforts the public health movement had the most immediate, the least ambiguous, and the most accurately measurable positive effects on the lives of Canadian children.

Type
The Child, the Family, and the State
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. I examine this reform movement as a whole in my forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation, “Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth Century Consensus” (Minnesota, 1973). See also my article “The Urban Child,” History of Education Quarterly, 9 (Fall 1969): 305–11.Google Scholar

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78. P.H.J., 2 (December 1911): 588–89.Google Scholar

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81. N.C.W., Yearbook, 1912, p. 102; Heagerty, John J., Four Centuries of Medical History (Toronto, 1928), pp. 226–45.Google Scholar

82. Ontario Board of Health, Report, 1910, pp. 148–50.Google Scholar

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86. P.H.J., 5 (March 1914): 160.Google Scholar

87. Browne, , “School Nursing in Regina,“ pp. 9193.Google Scholar

88. “Medical Inspection of Schools in British Columbia,” ibid., 5 (March 1914): 150.Google Scholar

89. Ibid., p. 153.Google Scholar

90. Struthers, , The School Nurse, pp. 14.Google Scholar

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92. Struthers, , The School Nurse, p. 40.Google Scholar

93. P.H.J., 4 (February 1913): 94.Google Scholar

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98. For the origin and development of the oral hygiene crusade, see Hicks, E. B., “Free Examination of School Children's Teeth: What Oral Hygiene Means to Them,“ D.D.J., 22 (October 1910): 460–66; Day, Arthur, “What is Being Done Outside of the Dental Office for the Improvement of the Human Mouth,” P.H.J., 3 (May 1912): 235–39; Dieck, Professor Dr., “The Care of the Teeth of School Children in Germany,” ibid., 4 (June 1913): 366–69, and McCluggage, Robert M., A History of the American Dental Association: A Century of Health Service (Chicago, 1959), pp. 248–53. For what dentists saw as the social implications of their work see the talk by Thornton, Dr. A. W., Toronto, to the Canadian Public Health Association's 1912 meeting entitled “The Dentist as Social Worker,” P.H.J., 3 (September 1912): 524; and Cowan, W. D., “Dental Caries in School Children and Dental Inspection,” ibid., 4 (November 1913): 602–5.Google Scholar

99. See, for example, Stuart, James, “Public School Medical Inspection,“ Canadian Therapeutist 1 (August 1910): 379–81.Google Scholar

100. P.H.J., 3 (April 1912): 222; see also, Kennedy, C. P., “Report on the Mouths and Teeth of the Children in Two Public Schools of Toronto,” D.D.J., 22 (December 1910): 571–72, and Webster, A. E., “Dental Inspection of Two Schools in Toronto,” ibid., pp. 600–4.Google Scholar

101. See, for example, Struthers, The School Nurse, pp. 141–42, 205–25, and Browne, “School Nursing in Regina,” p. 93.Google Scholar

102. British Columbia Board of Health, Report, 1920, p. 15.Google Scholar

103. Canada, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Historical Statistical Survey of Education in Canada (Ottawa, 1921), p. 110.Google Scholar

104. International Congress of Women, Report … 1909, 2:58.Google Scholar

105. P.H.J., 3 (April 1912): 222.Google Scholar

106. Handbook, p. 153.Google Scholar

107. Ibid., pp. 81–82.Google Scholar

108. Vancouver School Board, Report, 1919, p. 39.Google Scholar

109. Ontario Board of Health, Report, 1921, p. 317.Google Scholar

110. Handbook, p. 40.Google Scholar

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