Health and education

What is it about?

This article examines the historical roots of the modern relationship between health and education. It draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem to make the case that the transformation of medical knowledge in the early 19th century created new ways of knowing that were foundations of a modern relationship between health and education. Using the methods of science, ophthalmologists sought to establish that a deleterious relationship existed between school conditions (including pedagogy) and the health of school children, e.g., material conditions in school led to poor health especially myopia.

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Why is it important?

The entry of ophthalmologists into schools in Europe and North America at the dawn of medical modernity and medical specialization in the early to mid-nineteenth century ushered in the modern sense of the medicalization of schooling. This comprises a history of the present. It is not a history of continuity but a history of mutation punctuated by epistemic shifts. One such shift occurred with the invention of the ophthalmoscope by Hermann von Helmholtz that corresponded with the emergence of an ethos of objectivity in science.

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