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  • Tending the Student Body: Youth, Health, and the Modern University by Catherine Gidney
  • Heather Munro Prescott
Tending the Student Body: Youth, Health, and the Modern University.
By Catherine Gidney.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. x + 294 pp. Cloth $66.70, paper $34.95.

Today’s college students are accustomed to having their institutions take care of their physical and mental health needs. Fancy gyms have even become recruitment tools for elite institutions competing for fitness-conscious students. Tending the Student Body traces the creation of health programs at Canadian universities back to the early twentieth century. Gidney argues that concerns about the physical and moral health of college students “led to the creation of new sites through which administrators could exert their moral vision of the university and shape the student body” (9). Although other historians have examined the relationship between higher education and middle-class youth formation in Canada, Gidney is the first to show how administrators and medical experts drew on new ideas about health to support their views about the mission of higher education in Canadian society. In doing so, Gidney makes important contributions to the history of Canadian higher education, medical history, gender history, and the history of childhood and youth.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, consisting of chapters 1 through 5, looks at the origins of student health facilities and physical education programs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gidney persuasively argues that for the doctors, physical educators, and administrators who set up these programs, “health was not just an end in itself.” Rather, health programs for students were also aimed at “instilling the values and ideals of middle class society” (75). Gidney examines how health experts’ work on protecting student minds and bodies contributed to middle class youth formation in twentieth-century Canada. These experts viewed the college years as an extended phase of adolescence, and saw students as a critical audience for health advice because of their future roles as politicians, teachers, social workers, and other professionals who would further spread health information to less educated audiences.

Gidney also builds on existing studies that show the ways in which gender ideals impacted student health programs. Physical culture programs for women addressed concerns about the impact of higher education on the female body, [End Page 125] while programs for men aimed to preserve their masculinity and fitness for military service. Gidney looks not only at how these gender expectations affected students but also how they created new opportunities for female professionals to tend the female student body.

In the second part of the book, comprising chapters 6 through 8, Gidney traces an important shift in discourse about the purpose of university education starting in the 1930s and 1940s and continuing through the 1960s. During this period, health experts, physical educators, and administrators began to employ the language of personality to describe the purpose of university life for students’ individual formation as adults. Unlike the older concept of character, which emphasized self-sacrifice to God and nation, “the new discourse of personality focused on self-realization—the development of an individual’s specific characteristics and traits in order to provide that individual with the greatest chance of fulfillment and success” (164). As in the case of character formation, the discourse of personality framed the college years as the “final stage of adolescence” and the purpose of student health programs as helping students to develop well-adjusted personalities capable of handling adult roles and responsibilities.

Gidney shows that by the mid-1960s, students were borrowing from this discourse of personality to engage in various campaigns for social rights—including their own rights to be treated like adults on campus. Since Gidney ends her book in the 1960s, it is unclear whether these new demands for student rights shaped health services in Canada as I have shown they did in the United States. However, Tending the Student Body is not meant to be a comprehensive history of physical education or the rise of student health services. Rather, Gidney aims to show what these health initiatives “reveal about the changing ideals of student formation as well as the nature...

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