"Why and How Should We Protect Children's Health": Czech School Hygiene and Childhood in the Last Third ofthe Nineteenth Century
Abstract
It is more than obvious that 19th century ideas about childhood were definitely strongly influenced by rapid growth of mass public schooling. The child has become, more than ever before, an object of interest to wide range of experts, but mainly to educators and physicians.
Together with rise of new expertise about child and childhood occurred variety of child centered policies and number of new institutions for children. Childhood was perceived as a specific stage of human life or a specific developmental process of child.
Development of the child was seen as important object for observation but primarily it demanded precise and careful control. Within the newly forming modern civic society, this control was increasingly entrusted in expert hands of educators and physicians.
Since the radical reforms of the schooling system in Austria-Hungary in 1869 educators and physicians started to be much more sensitive to issues concerning health and its protection, because they recognized the threats that mass public schooling posed to child's health. In my paper I try to stress how this newly established public education and its subsequent medicinalization influenced ideas about childhood in Czech lands right after 1869.
Above mentioned issue will be demonstrated on the cooperation between the very first Czech teachers association Beseda Učitelská and the Associtaion of Czech Physicians. The analysis of this cooperation allows me to examine intersections of pedagogical and medical discourses, which fundamentally reformulated power relations between educators and children, between physicians and children, between parents and children, and last but not least between educators and physicians in the last third of the 19th century