Children's Health Issues in Historical Perspective (review)

Although scholarly interest in the history of children and childhood is at least a half-century old, comparable interest in the history of children's health and health services is considerably younger. It wasn't until the late 1980s, for instance, that historians began to explore the emergence of pediatrics as a medical specialty, and efforts by the medical profession, women's organizations, philanthropy, and the state to improve infant care and obstetric services and reduce infant and maternal mortality. And it was not until even more recently that historians began exploring the health and health care of older children and adolescents, as well as private and governmental efforts to improve both. Unlike the work on infant and maternal welfare, this latter exploration, although equally international, has not yet produced a collection of monographs that comprehensively details and examines developments within particular countries and allows for international comparison. Instead, it has produced a fast-expanding body of relatively narrowly focused essays, for the most part published in specialized scholarly journals and therefore hidden from the non-specialist historian. Not surprisingly, then, there has been some effort of late to publish this literature in collections of essays and therefore to make it more accessible. Children's Health Issues in Historical Perspective is one such effort.

Put together and edited by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh and Veronica Strong-Boag, two Canadian social and medical historians, Children's Health Issues in Historical Perspective brings together seventeen essays written by an international collection of scholars: twelve Canadians, five Americans, a New Zealander, and an Australian. For those with even a passing acquaintance with the history of infant and child health in North America, many of the names of these scholars will be familiar. One reason might be that almost all of the essays, or versions of them, were previously published elsewhere; for instance, eight of the essays plus the introduction appeared in a 2002 issue of the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. The value of the collection, then, resides less in its presentation of new scholarship than in its bringing together in one place a collection of work large and broad enough to provide a substantive and comparative overview not only of child health and health services in the past, but also of the issues and approaches being explored by historians working in the field.

In a lengthy introduction, Warsh and Strong-Boag attempt to highlight the most important of these approaches and tie together the seventeen essays by stressing that all are motivated by an understanding that children, childhood, and child health are not homogenous categories, and that the young live lives of various identities that determine how their childhood and health are conceptualized and how health services for them are rationalized. As a consequence, the editors assert, all the essays in the collection describe the malleability of children and child health in the rhetoric of those who had influence over children's lives, especially educators, public health officials, and political leaders.

Warsh and Strong-Boag organize the essays into five sections—politics, nutrition, racial and ethnic dimensions, experts, and institutions—attempting to provide in each section a diversity of topics and national experiences. Thus, the section on racial and ethnic dimensions contains essays on Progressive-era American health services for urban immigrant children, the medicalization of infant and maternal health in French colonial Vietnam, the role of gender and ethnicity in determining diagnosis and treatment in New Zealand's twentieth-century open-air health camps, the Pan American Sanitary Bureau's indifference through the first half of the twentieth century to promoting maternal and infant health, the deployment of hygienic education and practice to "Canadianize" aboriginal peoples in the northern territories, and the use of school medical inspection to universalize and normatize middle-class standards of personal hygiene.

Although the essays in each section vary widely in topic, they are quite consistent in quality. With no more than one...