Classrooms and Clinics: Urban Schools and the Protection and Promotion of Child Health, 1870-1930

Acknowledgments

ix For historians, the research and writing of a scholarly monograph is often an intensely solitary endeavor. Yet none of us ever works entirely alone, and thus I would like to use this opportunity to thank those who provided me with support and assistance. Very little of the research for this book could have been done without the invaluable help of the staffs of the Rockefeller, Science, and Hay Libraries at Brown University; the Rhode Island Historical Society Library; the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University; the New York Academy of Medicine; the libraries at Yale University, Columbia University , Rhode Island College, and the University of Michigan; and the Boston, Providence, and New York Public Libraries. Travel to those libraries as well as time away from teaching for research and writing was supported by the Brown University Faculty Research Fund, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a National Library of Medicine Publication Grant, and a Spencer Foundation Small Grant Award. I also would be remiss if I did not thank Arthur and the late Carol Taylor, who on my many research trips to New York made their house mine. Chapter 1 is a revised and expanded version of an essay that appeared as “Going to School, Getting Sick: The Social and Medical Construction of ‘School Diseases’ in the Late 19th Century,” in Formative Years: Children’s Health in America, 1880–2000, edited by Alexandra Minna Stern and Howard Markel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 185–207. Chapter 4 contains portions of the following previously published articles: “Open-Air Schools and the Tuberculous Child in Early 20th Century America,” Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 150 (1996): 91–96; and “Combating Tuberculosis in School Children: Providence’s Open-Air Schools,” Rhode Island History 53 (1996): 91–100. I thank the respective publishers for granting me permission to use the material. Over the years, many individuals provided various types of intellectual support that enabled me to produce this book. Invaluable intellectual stimulation was and continues to be provided daily by my wonderful, creative, and so often brilliant undergraduate students at Brown. They have consistently made teaching a pleasure and an equal companion to my scholarship. I owe much to my former and present graduate students, particularly Ashley BowenMurphy , Laura Briggs, Crista DeLuzio, Jessica Foley, Gill Frank, Wen Jin, Acknowledgments x Acknowledgments Miriam Reumann, James Ross, and Elizabeth Searcy, with all of whom I’ve had the fortune of holding many conversations related to the history of childhood, social welfare, medicine, and public health. I also owe a huge debt to a group of historians, many of whom I met through the American Association for the History of Medicine and the Society for the History of Children and Youth. Publishing with me, sharing conference and symposium panels, reading and providing feedback on my scholarship in progress, or just exchanging ideas with me, they have provided me with an intellectual community that has done much to sustain me as a scholar through the years. In particular I want to thank Rima Apple, Jeffrey Baker, Jeffrey Brosco, John Burnham, Cynthia Connolly, Hughes Evans, Paula Fass, Janet Golden, Gerald Grob, Margaret Humphreys, Kathleen Jones, Alan Kraut, Kriste Lindenmeyer, Howard Markel, Steven Mintz, Heather Munro Prescott, Naomi Rogers, Alexandra Minna Stern, Elizabeth Toon, Arlene Tuchman, and Deborah Weinstein. I also would like to thank Peter Mikulas, at Rutgers University Press, for shepherding this book to publication. I am especially grateful for the enduring patience and professionalism with which he responded to my many questions and requests. Finally, I want to thank my immediate family. I am much indebted to my daughter, Katherine, and my son, Peter, for being who they are and making fatherhood both infinitely challenging and rewarding. Most of all, however, I want to thank my wife, Mary Paula Hunter, to whom this book is dedicated. Without her close reading and critical comments, her constant encouragement and support, and her unflagging faith in me, this book would never have been produced. The depth of my gratitude to her is exceeded only by that of my love for her. Classrooms and Clinics ...