Bodies of knowledge: historians, health and education

ABSTRACT

There are multiple vantage points from which historians have observed the ways in which both diseased and healthy bodies (as well as their constituent parts) have served as tools of knowledge generation, instruction and coercion in the hands of medical practitioners. From spaces of formal, specialist education such as the medical school to more informal environments and modes of learning, there is a seemingly never-ending array of environments, actors and materials to consider when trying to construct a representative survey of the two fields. Focusing primarily on the British case, this article takes a selective view of the different kinds of environments, actors and approaches historians have used to understand pedagogies of health and medicine in the modern period before suggesting new avenues of potential inquiry.

KEYWORDS:

• History of education
• history of medicine
• history of childhood
• medical education

Introduction

There is a sense of taken-for-grantedness regarding the relationship between histories of health and the body and histories of education and learning. Indeed, there are multiple vantage points from which historians have observed the ways in which both diseased and healthy bodies (as well as their constituent parts) have served as tools of knowledge generation, instruction and coercion in the hands of medical practitioners. From spaces of formal, specialist education such as the medical school to more informal environments and modes of learning, there is a seemingly never-ending array of environments, actors and materials to consider when trying to construct a representative (or even partially representative) survey of the two fields.

The focus of this article is on the intersection between histories of medicine and histories of education of the Anglophone world in the modern period, with particular attention paid to the British case. So this is far from a transnational or global survey; the selection of primary and secondary literature cited here is intended to be impressionistic rather than exhaustive. Some of the key historiographical themes that emerge in this article – including the anti-vaccination movement, smoking, sexual literacy and soap – give a clue as to the (intimidating) breadth of research available. So there remain a number of omissions in my attempts to synthesise the two fields within a relatively short space: I am thinking particularly of the history of special education, which has similar historiographical surveys located elsewhere.¹

The first two sections of this essay focus on the formal spaces of education, beginning first with histories of university medical education. It will show how institutional histories of medical education have, from the 1980s onwards, increasingly looked at the question of community and identity formation in medical schools. It will discuss how historians of medicine have adopted new techniques and perspectives ranging from prosography to print culture and the history of emotions in reconstructing the medical student experience. It finishes with a consideration of the ways in which the historiography could potentially move forward through a more careful consideration of the multifarious relationship between medical students and nurses, and the implications such scholarship may have for our understanding the gendered curriculum of the medical school.

This essay then moves beyond the walls of the medical school to see how the expertise garnered in the lecture hall and dissecting room contributed to the medicalisation of young bodies and the emergence of childhood health as a distinct clinical specialism. The relocation of child health from public to private was, as has been discussed elsewhere, both the result and resulted from the shifting boundaries of medical expertise and enhanced optimism regarding the prophylactic and therapeutic potential of the medical sciences.² Concerns over infant and childhood mortality, infectious disease and nutrition provided an opportunity for doctors to craft new roles for themselves, providing recent medical graduates with new career paths and research opportunities at a time of enhanced concern regarding the physical, moral and mental integrity of the child. The epistemic claims of the medical sciences in turn provided compelling arguments that helped to both establish and sustain a diverse landscape of educational provision for children whose bodies, minds and souls were seen to be at risk. The result was a diverse approach to child health that saw the emergence of new roles such as the school medical officer and worked to support new institutional solutions to childhood health. This was particularly the case with native and indigenous children, wherein the tenets of eugenic medicine provided residential schools and other places of institutional segregation and isolation with a degree of scientific legitimacy.

The final section looks at more informal spaces of education by looking at public health education and technologies of mass education from the late nineteenth century onwards. From posters to public information films to adverts on omnibuses, both state-sponsored and philanthropic attempts to raise awareness of disease and/or inculcate new health behaviours reveal the ways in which new educational technologies transformed the relationship between publics and practitioners.

Making medical practitioners

Institutional histories of medical schools have proved a long-abiding and popular topic for both pre- and post-war historians of medicine. As Keir Waddington wrote in the introduction to his own study of medical education at St Bartholomew’s, however, histories of medical education prior to the 1980s were often limited in their thematic, chronological and geographical range. The question of teaching was frequently assigned a supporting role in celebratory accounts of hospital progress, leaving little room for the voices of students.³ The transformative institutional and intellectual impact of a new generation of historians of medicine emerging out of the new Wellcome University Units in the 1970s – many of whom drew inspiration from new fields such as science and technology studies, social history, and philosophy of science⁴ – was reflected in a new wave of studies into the history of medical education. Such studies, for example, began to consider more closely the ways in which students actively shaped their educational experiences in the crowded medical marketplace of early nineteenth-century Europe. Such students were advocates for and shapers of curricular change, actors who are more helpfully thought of as consumers than passive recipients of medical knowledge.⁵ In the 1980s, too, the de-centring of practitioner-led histories of institutional triumphalism produced similar research in the history of education. Newly critical studies began to reckon with the ways in which educational institutions marginalised and silenced children, women, the working classes and persons of colour, and the subsequent ways in which historians were capable of reproducing such silences.⁶ Works looking into new social and cultural histories of classroom spaces have in turn drawn upon a range of different materials and approaches – visual, spatial, material – to better understand the lived experiences of pupils and teachers.⁷

The works discussed below demonstrate the ways in which the similar journeys taken by the two fields from the 1980s onwards have produced a number of convergences. New histories of curricular change and professional identity formation by historians both of medicine and of education have been characterised by a willingness to explore new methods and sources from the fields of collective biography, gender history, visual history and histories of the body. There is not the space here, however, for a full or complete account of historiographical evolution and change: the account of the various ‘turns’ that have characterised both fields is discussed more fully (and capably) elsewhere.⁸

It is only relatively recently that student-centred histories of medical education have begun to take on a more prominent role in the historiography of medicine. Arguably beginning with the work of Thomas Bonner in his seminal Becoming a Physician: Medical Education in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, 1750–1945 (2001) – and continuing in particular through the institutional and national histories of medical education written by Keir Waddington and, later, Laura Kelly⁹ – a number of historians of medical education have begun to focus more explicitly on processes of socialisation, professionalisation and collective identity formation in the medical school. Prosographical studies have proved particularly relevant to historians looking to trace the educational trajectories of medical students. Ruth Watts’s study of Birmingham, for example, presents a case for understanding the high uptake of women medical students at Birmingham medical school by demonstrating how Birmingham’s (slow and uneven) growth in provision for secondary science education for girls, coupled with its large number of middle-class non-dissenting families keen to secure their daughters’ futures, provided an atmosphere conducive to female medical students.¹⁰ Similar work by Anne Crowther and Marguerite Dupree into the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh has revealed how important factors such as the provision of accessible primary and secondary schooling as well as residential status shaped medical student demographics at the two institutions.¹¹ Kelly’s study of Irish medical education, too, has shown just how important were the twin factors of geographical proximity and educational provision in influencing an individual’s choice of school.¹²

Another pivot has been towards understanding the role that community has played in constituting professional identity through the varied spaces of medical learning – such as the hospital ward, dissecting room, medical museum or sports field. These spaces all played an important role in creating a shared body of professional knowledge, acting as venues for the self-fashioning of medical identities wherein students ‘became acculturated to the medical gaze’.¹³ Print cultures, too, served as a means for fostering community between students, who were active in advocating for curricular change, with student magazines often serving as an intergenerational battleground between competing styles and approaches to not only medical education, but clinical praxis at large.¹⁴ Recent insights by historians of education into juvenile print culture have reaffirmed the importance of textual production as a site for generational conflict. But they also point towards new avenues for interpreting these sources beyond using them as evidence of generational, professional and intellectual conflict in educational settings. Work by Catherine Sloan, for example, has demonstrated how manuscript production was an ‘ordinary part of institutional life’ for many middle-class pupils attending Quaker ‘public’ schools.¹⁵ Participation in these textual spaces worked simultaneously to both limit and direct the reading habits of pupils whilst also ‘[liberating] pupils to diverge from institutional culture’ through their own reading, archival and writing practices.¹⁶ What might happen, then, when we consider periodical and manuscript production on its own terms – as a set of material and epistemic practices that took shape alongside the formal curriculum of the medical school? How can participation in such a culture shed further light on the evolving character of medicine, building upon work by other historians in further exploring the distinctions between gentlemanly and scientific medicine?¹⁷

Recent scholarship has stressed the affective as well as technical aspects of the medical student curriculum. Rob Boddice has shown how the spatial configurations of physiological teaching laboratories, for example, helped instruct students in the affective practices necessary to conduct experiments on animals.¹⁸ Emotional regulation and control was a central component of all aspects of medical education, however – particularly surgery. Lynda Payne for example has shown how medical ‘dispassion’ was a critical skill cultivated amongst early-modern surgeons,¹⁹ while later work on the intersection of the history of emotions and history of surgery has shown how the trope of the dispassionate surgeon obscures the ways in which ‘nineteenth century practitioners found value in affective as well as technical expertise’.²⁰ Although similar studies into historical teaching practices are sparser on the ground, there are a number of works that have functioned to historicise the gendered dimensions of ‘emotional labour’ in teaching in much the same vein as the history of surgical emotions.²¹ Understanding both the operating room and the classroom as emotional theatres in particular compels us to pay attention to the ways in which both teachers and surgeons played similar roles in encountering, treating and enacting pain on vulnerable bodies.

In this way, the medical student’s unique bodily encounters with different kinds of bodies provide a potent (if challenging) opportunity for continuing study into what Mona Gleason has termed an ‘embodied theory of educational relations’, that accounts ‘for the dynamic interplay among and between bodies, places, things, and the development of human subjectivities’.²² The possibilities that such an approach has towards better understanding the relationship between race, pedagogy and student culture in the configuration of medical expertise can be seen in John Harley Warner’s work, for example, into dissection room portraiture in American medical schools. This primarily student-led photographic phenomenon, as Warner writes, reflected medical students’ ‘privileged access to the body’ and served as ‘autobiographical … devices by which the students placed themselves into a larger, shared story of becoming a doctor’.²³ As Warner writes, this process of medical identity formation among students was often predicated upon racist logics that were themselves grounded in and maintained by a relative ease of access to black bodies at medical schools.²⁴ Visual histories of schooling, too, have shown how children of colour were often appropriated as props in the newly emerging genre of school photography.²⁵ In both instances, then, hospitals and schools acted as pedagogical venues that legitimised the spectatorship of black bodies through new forms of visual documentation.

More, however, could be done to better situate medical students within the complex labour hierarchies of the hospital environment, and the different types of working bodies they encountered there. While histories of institutional medical education have done much to disentangle the complex affective and professional relationship between lecturer and student, and while medical histories have done much to stress the homosocial spaces and paternalistic culture of medical education, which did much to alienate women medical students, nurses and nursing knowledge are often left sidelined in accounts of the medical student experience.²⁶ Themes of professional collaboration (and contestation) in the hospital ward and operating theatre – acting as sites for both formal and informal knowledge transmission between doctors, surgeons, medical students and nurses – have worked to expand our understanding of who ‘did’ medicine in this period, recapturing the central role that nurses played in a number of medical and surgical innovations.²⁷ Relatedly, historians of medicine such as Keir Waddington, Vanessa Heggie and others have already done much to show that the professionalisation of the medical doctor relied much on the binary between the learned doctor and the ‘uneducated’ nurse, a distinction that allowed the former to ‘write themselves firmly into [a] new modern system of medical training and practice’.²⁸

The interstitial nature of both nursing and medical education provided scope for a number of different – but interrelated – types of encounter: pedagogical, professional and personal. The latter, however, has gone relatively underexplored. Sexual self-restraint was, as Anne-Marie Rafferty has written, a critical part of ‘character’ training for nurses, providing ‘insurance against the nurse exploiting the proximity of the nurse–patient relationship’.²⁹ Historians of nursing have noted the sexually predatory nature of some medical students towards hospital nurses,³⁰ and the dual sexualisation and romanticisation of the nurse in mid-nineteenth-century fiction,³¹ as well as (sparsely recorded) incidences of consensual sexual contact between nurses and medical students.³² As Agnes Arnold-Forster writes, the popular genre of doctor–nurse romance novels in mid-century Britain – many of which were written by nurses – reflected the ‘affective richness of their [the authors’] past and current clinical working environments’.³³ Historians interested in further deconstructing the gendered experience of ‘doing’ medicine would do well to further explore sexual encounters between medical students and nurses, both consensual and non-consensual. With regard to the latter, historians of medicine could draw upon work by Adrian Bingham, Lucy Delap and others, which has used recent inquiries into institutional childhood sexual abuse to help structure an ‘archaeology of the past’ to ‘trace … the repeated submerging’ of sexual abuse in schools and other institutional settings for children.³⁴

There were a number of different career paths open to graduates of medical schools in this period, including familiar fields such as general practice or work in new arenas, particularly public health. Work as a school medical officer (SMO), for example, was one of the newer career options open to British medical graduates following the implementation of the School Medical Service under the auspices of the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act of 1907. Though decried by some as a ‘dead end’ – with monotonous working patterns and relatively low pay – it did, as David Hirst writes, provide a relatively secure outlet for recent medical graduates, particularly women.³⁵ Similar kinds of roles could also be spotted throughout Europe and the Anglophone world, bringing the realms of professional medicine and compulsory schooling together and – in doing so – entangling schoolchildren, teachers, parents and doctors in new ways. This ‘discovery’ of childhood health leads us on to the next section of this paper.

Classroom/clinic

Historians have regularly turned their attention towards the formalisation of school medical services to probe broader questions surrounding the relationship between children, orthodox medicine and the state. The spaces of compulsory schooling provided a natural place of experiment, activism and career progression for doctors operating across a broad variety of national, regional and local contexts. The introduction of school medical inspection in Canada,³⁶ Australia³⁷ and the Netherlands,³⁸ to pick just some examples, all reveal commonalities: not only in terms of how childhood health was addressed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century state, but also how historians of childhood have demonstrated how consistently – across a diverse range of national, political and institutional contexts – school children have served as ‘natural targets for sanitary surveillance’.³⁹ In this way the work of the SMO embodied the eugenicist ‘optimistic possibilities of planning future generations’.⁴⁰ Historians have stressed, however, the need to see the medicalisation of school life as having penetrated all aspects of the schooling experience. In a 2019 chapter, Kellie Burns et al. use the term ‘curriculum of the body’ in an attempt to draw together the different historical sub-disciplines (including the history of medicine) that have been used to try and understand ‘histories of embodiment or corporeality in and through schooling’. By taking an ‘expanded view of [the curriculum]’ that ‘encompasses not just the content or transmission of formal syllabuses’,⁴¹ the authors argue that the ‘formal and informal technologies and practices of curriculum’⁴² – including but not limited to issues such as school uniform, desk placement and writing habits –we can fully understand ‘the production and governance of children’s bodies in and through schooling practices’.⁴³ One common research strand has explored how schoolchildren became subject to new and novel forms of therapeutic and diagnostic technologies that formed part of a broader ‘civilizing’ mission, aiming to improve rates of childhood morbidity and mortality from infectious diseases like polio, tuberculosis and smallpox, as well as conditions such as malnutrition. However, schoolchildren’s encounters with orthodox medicine were highly varied: histories of child health, therefore, have done much to emphasise the ways in which such encounters shaped racialised, gendered and disabled experiences and models of childhood. Children from working-class, immigrant and indigenous families and communities⁴⁴ have been identified as particularly vulnerable to pathologisation, segregation and institutionalisation. The historiography of Canadian childhoods – particularly indigenous childhoods – has been at the forefront here since the 1990s,⁴⁵ and a wealth of work has emerged focusing on how Canadian childhoods were shaped by the biopolitical technologies of the colonial state. Residential schooling in particular offered a convenient solution for protecting and assimilating indigenous children: whether from infectious disease or poor parenting.⁴⁶ Historians of Canadian childhood like Mary-Ellen Kelm have done much to emphasise, however, the ways in which the bodies of indigenous children were made even more vulnerable in these settings: whether through physical, emotional and sexual abuse, as well as their exposure to infectious diseases like tuberculosis, and malnutrition.⁴⁷ Much work in this direction by historians has focused on the recovery and amplification of the voices of indigenous actors who were not only victims of racist medical ideas, but also worked in various ways to challenge scholarship medical orthodoxies about what was ‘best’ for their children.⁴⁸ The urgency and necessity of such has been in part informed by ongoing debates about how Canada should engage with the contemporary legacy of settler violence in its residential schools,⁴⁹ including how it continues to shape differential health outcomes for First Nations people through the effects of intergenerational trauma.⁵⁰ At the time of writing this article, the remains of First Nations children were discovered at the site of the (now defunct) Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. There are ongoing questions surrounding the identification and recovery of the remains of indigenous children at defunct residential schools,⁵¹ showing how the already extensive work undertaken by historians of Canadian childhoods will need to continue as a matter of historical redress and, potentially, healing.

Understanding how school children themselves experienced and negotiated school medical services (or school medicine more broadly) has proved a more elusive task. Historians of childhood such as Mona Gleason have often used oral testimony alongside published documentary evidence (including medical texts) to explore both how ‘adult experts understood the bodies of children and how adults remember their bodies in childhood’.⁵² Where oral testimony is unavailable or has proven elusive, historians have turned to visual forms of data, and the ‘pictorial turn’ has proved particularly useful in providing new perspectives on embodied histories of schooling. Geert Thyssen’s work on open-air schooling deserves special attention here, particularly his research into the role that photography played in the medicalisation of child bodies. But Thyssen also reminds us to look at absences and ambiguities located in photographs to pose questions, provocations and speculations regarding ‘the negotiated autonomy of schoolchildren’.⁵³

The rise of medical managerialism in the school has prompted historians of education to look beyond the nexus of the child–doctor or child–teacher–doctor relationship and recognise the implications that the formalisation of state-funded school medical services had for evolving models of parenthood as well. What implications did such services have for parental agency at a time when the modern state was assuming a more proactive position with regard to childhood protection? How did the making of ‘scientific motherhood’ – which relied upon the undermining of vernacular maternal knowledge practices – contribute to a (slow and uneven) displacement of the family home as the default site of medical care? In her survey of childhood health from 1700 to 1950, Alysa Levene explores the complex dichotomies between public and private spaces and healthcare practices. The gradual displacement of medical care from the site of the home was achieved through diverse institutional landscapes of medical provision that all sought, in various ways, to act as places of treatment and as places of instruction, such as dispensaries, children’s hospitals and specialist schools. Although parents had restricted access to their children through institutional policies (such as delimited visiting hours), they could exercise their authority in other ways, such as withdrawing their children from treatment.⁵⁴ When it came to the formal spaces of schooling, English parents also often agitated for improved schoolroom conditions, particularly when it came to ‘delicate’ conditions: in this way, the state had no choice but to ‘actively – and explicitly – [engage] with the beliefs and concerns of adults whose authority lay in their experience of caring for their vulnerable children’.⁵⁵ Parents of disabled children have featured prominently in the historiography, too, as both contesting and collaborating with medical authorities when it came to navigating medical care for their children.⁵⁶ Parental authority featured prominently, too, in the politically charged debates parents participated in when it came to the issue of childhood vaccination in both the nineteenth⁵⁷ and twentieth centuries.⁵⁸ As vaccination was (and is) commonly administered on the site of the school, it would be worthwhile to further contextualise the networks in which such parental opposition was mounted. It would be interesting, for example, to further explore the role that schoolteachers themselves played as participants in the anti-vaccination movement in the nineteenth century.⁵⁹ Such a study into the anti-vaccination politics of teachers and other educationalists could highlight, as Hester Barron has done in her study of interwar London schools, the ways in which teachers and parents successfully collaborated when it came to matters of child health.⁶⁰

In a 2006 paper, Stephen Petrina advised historians of education to look towards the more ‘subtle’ processes of classroom medicalisation. He put forward a case for a history of the medicalisation of the classroom in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America that was ‘material inasmuch as it was ideological’.⁶¹ It is only through a concentration on practices, he argues, that we can recognise the ways in which the ‘productive, pedagogical gaze’ of the clinic continues to inform the ways in which modern modes of schooling approach difference.⁶² This call to attend more carefully to practices and material histories has been a regular feature in the historiography of medicine since the early 1990s,⁶³ with a similar call to action for historians of education emerging more recently.⁶⁴ While valuable work has been done on the hygienification of the classroom through case studies looking at, for example, the development of desks designed to combat scoliosis and poor posture amongst students,⁶⁵ there is undoubtedly scope to do more.

Work by historians of post-war medicine in particular brings to the surface new kinds of interventions and perspectives that historians of education can offer on material cultures of classroom health, particularly with regard to how teachers and local educational authorities navigated the newly enlarged role of the state in public health education. The case of anti-smoking campaigns in schools offers one such example. In her research into smoking in post-war Britain, Virginia Berridge offers tantalising glimpses of the ways in which local education authorities at this time exercised considerable autonomy as the British state developed a more coherent and interventionist health education policy.⁶⁶ Schools continued to exercise discretion over what government-sponsored educational materials they did and did not allow into their classrooms into the 1980s.⁶⁷ Such episodes bring to mind Martin Lawn and Ian Grosvenor’s work into material cultures of the classroom, and the ways in which teachers exercised their agency as consumers, collaborators and creators of educational materials.⁶⁸ The next section goes on to show how histories of educational material have prompted historians to look beyond formal instructional texts and towards the different kinds of media that have been historically employed to educate publics.

Educating publics

There is a large degree of epistemic uncertainty when we consider separately what exactly we mean by the above terms, and the definitional issues seem only to increase when we think of them in congress. Firs, one has to consider the ‘fluidity of “the public”, which was never one thing, but many’.⁶⁹ Then there is health: what exactly do we mean – or was meant by – this term? Though its meaning seems intuitive, historians and philosophers of medicine have devoted much time to showing precisely how unstable and contingent a concept it has been across different times, spaces and actors.⁷⁰ The concept of education, too, has undergone a similar revision.⁷¹ For the purposes of displaying the breadth and diversity of different historiographical approaches, I am adopting an expansive (perhaps overly so) definition of public (or perhaps, better, ‘publics’) and education. The studies discussed here range from accounts of autodidactic health education to accounts of large-scale mass media campaigns directed towards much larger audiences to give an indication of the different scales of inquiry historians both have taken and could take.

As Claire Hooker and Hans Pols write, ‘public health was and is intrinsically a media product’. As different forms of communication and mass media have developed – from penny periodicals to cigarette cards to film and television – so too have public health professionals and commercial actors sought to capitalise upon their reach to educate and persuade the public.⁷² Histories of medical advertising for example have shown the role that companies such as Pears Soap played in contributing towards a new visual grammar of health and medicine. In particular, Anne McClintock has used soap as a case study into how ‘Victorian advertising took explicit shape around the reinvention of racial difference’.⁷³

Historians of medicine have in turn demonstrated how public health educators appropriated and adapted the new advertising techniques and technologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to get their messages across to a broader audience. Discussing the anti-TB crusade in early twentieth-century America, Tomes discusses how public health educators ‘discovered’ ‘a veritable gold mine of persuasive techniques’ from the advertising industry: from jingles and cartoon posters, to peripatetic exhibitions.⁷⁴ Communicative strategies for public health education continued to borrow from the techniques of the advertising industry, particularly in the post-war period. Virginia Berridge and Kelly Loughlin for example have traced the complex history of twentieth-century anti-smoking campaigns in Britain, characterising the period broadly through a ‘central–local tension’ that marked attempts by the state to take a more (cautiously) proactive role in communicating the dangers of cigarette smoking.⁷⁵ In her book Marketing Health: Smoking and the Discourse of Public Health in Britain, 1945–2000 (2007), Berridge discusses how the 1964 Cohen report on health education and the formation of the Health Education Council in 1968 witnessed a shift in state public health communication in Britain. Transitioning from the often straightforwardly didactic style of the 1950s this ‘new breed’ of health educator of the 1960s was envisioned as an interdisciplinary professional who drew knowledge from and utilised practices from medicine, social psychology and journalism.⁷⁶ This reinvigorated approach to public health education was not limited to anti-smoking campaigns in this period, either: the popularisation of the pap smear as a tool for detecting abnormal cells in the cervix in the 1950s and 1960s led to the production of a range of educational materials – including leaflets and films – specifically targeting working-class women to encourage them to get screened.⁷⁷

When writing histories of public health education, it is a more precarious and difficult enterprise to trace ‘how the public “spoke back” to public health’.⁷⁸ In their study into post-war public health education, Alex Mold et al. sort such instances into acts of resistance, or complaints, or reinterpretation or appropriation of public health messages.⁷⁹ Reconstructing the various routes available for different kinds of publics to access medical knowledge – and, perhaps more importantly, what they did with such knowledge – has prompted historians to consider more closely different kinds of educational texts and venues available for learning about the body in health and disease. Let us follow for a moment the taxonomy of the history of education given by Jonathan Rose in his provocatively titled 2006 History of Education Paper ‘the History of Education as the History of Reading’:

My fundamental premise is simply this: that the history of reading is essential to recovering the history of education. All education comes from some form of reading…. It might be a printed text … an oral text … or even a musical text…. But all texts educate. This axiom, of course, leads to a very expansive definition of education, which would include formal, informal and self-education. It certainly presumes that education is a lifelong process, that takes place both inside and outside classrooms. Such a broad remit would make the historiography of education essential to, and practically coextensive with, the historiography of culture.⁸⁰

Historians of education such as Heather Ellis, too, have stressed the need for an ‘overarching history of education, focused not so much on the history of knowledge formation as on the history of knowledge transmission and of teaching and learning’.⁸¹ It is worth considering what this expansive view of what constitutes education has done to bring forth new approaches to understanding the role that education played in ‘everyday’ experiences of health, wellness and disease in the past with a case study: take for instance the sexual literacy of historical actors. In his Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), Rose demonstrated how Victorian working-class readers sought out a variety of different kinds of medical texts – from anatomical folios, to medical dictionaries and domestic medical manuals – to try and access knowledge about sex.⁸² Yet there was a larger and varied corpus for self-instruction in sex (broadly construed) than has often been assumed. As Claire L. Jones writes in her study into consumers and contraception in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, commercial materials such as trade catalogues offer a new (and as yet underutilised) vantage point for understanding the dissemination and consumption of medical knowledge.⁸³ Further reception studies have proved critical to understanding how medical knowledge was received and reshaped by non-medical experts – Rima D. Apple, for example, has shown how American mothers appropriated the advice of child guidance publications in the first half of the twentieth century.⁸⁴ Continuing with the theme of maternal health and child guidance, other studies have shown how women continued to access knowledge through informal kinship networks. Angela Davis, for example, has used oral history interviews to uncover the continuing importance and authority of family, friends and neighbours in the dissemination of knowledge concerning maternity and infant care in post-war Britain.⁸⁵

The literature cited above serves as case studies for Mark Freeman’s call for historians of adult education to continue trends to ‘move’ histories of adult education outside their traditional habitus in bodies such as the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) to better balance focus between the provider and the learner, the formal and the informal.⁸⁶ With this in mind, it would be worth exploring other critical junctures in the history of medicine that utilise underexplored texts (in its broadest sense) to trace – as far as possible – the ways in which people accessed, appropriated and instrumentalised medical knowledge. It would be foolish, however, to pretend this is anything like a novel proposition in the history of medicine: just as historians of education have voiced calls for learner-centred histories, so too in 1985 did Roy Porter call upon historians of medicine to move beyond physician-centric histories of health and disease to engage with the possibilities of a research agenda into the ‘Everyman Sick’.⁸⁷

The workplace offers a site that is perhaps underutilised by historians of education when considering how non-medical experts consumed, produced and disseminated medical education, broadly defined. Much work has already been done on top-down attempts to educate workers in the tenets of hygiene and disease prevention,⁸⁸ and the ways in which workers actively collaborated with medical authorities to further their organisational goals.⁸⁹ While work into labour organisations and the role they played in advocating for better working conditions enhanced access to medical care, and the recognition of certain diseases is already very broad,⁹⁰ historians of education can help offer further insight into the historical development of pedagogies of occupational health. In what ways did the pedagogical strategies adopted by workers build into and reflect their activism, their communal beliefs and their relationship with medical practitioners? How can we begin to create a more dynamic understanding of the different kinds of ‘lay epidemiologies’ of workplace health and disease by understanding the formation of different kinds of pedagogies of medical instruction? The workplace is just one example of a venue that would benefit from further scrutiny by historians of education interested in expanding the borders of their discipline.

Conclusion

It is perhaps telling that in her 1991 article on bridges and boundaries in the history of education, in which Maxine Schwartz Seller praised the ways in which historians of education had built a number of inter- and cross-disciplinary ‘bridges’ with fields such as the history of childhood, women’s studies and demography, she did not include the history of medicine.⁹¹ She did, nonetheless, cite several references to the entry of women into medical education.⁹²

There are still a number of natural contact zones between the historiography of medicine and the body and the historiography of education and learning that have, more often than not, been implicitly rather than explicitly stated. A notable exception is the history of classroom medicine and school hygiene covered in the second section of this article; here, themes of vulnerability, agency and the political instrumentalisation of childhood have emerged with accounts of ‘the school as clinic’.⁹³ There are, likewise, a number of ‘turns’ that have been shared by historians of medicine and of education, some of which we have discussed briefly in this article: the pictorial, the material, the bodily, the sensory, the affective. In the process of trying to recapture what it was like to learn about healthy and unhealthy states of being – and faced with the issue of scanty, first-person accounts of the learners themselves – historians have turned to the body to fill in the gaps. However, while there has been a clear and discrete move towards embodied histories of childhood, historians of education have devoted less time to how adult bodies were also subject to new kinds of therapeutic pedagogies.⁹⁴

Indeed, historians of education have found less to write about with regard to the medicalisation of adult education in both its formal and informal iterations. This is undoubtedly partly due to a comparatively scantier, and perhaps trickier, source base.⁹⁵ There is also perhaps a tendency to equate or reduce the history of medicine to a history of institutions, coercion and vulnerability, or to see the history of medical education as a straightforwardly didactic enterprise. Yet much of the work cited in the third section of this article demonstrates how many diverse educational opportunities there were to encounter medicine throughout all stages of the life course. The ephemerality, limited source base and definitional fuzziness that comes with approaching education in medicine, health and the body in this way poses perhaps the biggest problem for continuing scholarship that can bring histories of learning and histories of education together in mutually productive ways. Yet, as work by historians of science and of medicine has shown, there is still more to be done when we revisit texts that appear – at least on the surface level – innocuous or, at the very least, already very well-mined. Thinking further forward still, new research into the history of post-war health and medicine discussed in the second section of this article indicates potential avenues for beneficial, cross-disciplinary research into the relationship among teachers, parents and state medicine. Oral testimonies of policy change and evolution are especially needed to complement learner-centred histories.⁹⁶

Beyond extending the chronological scope of research or diversifying where we understand the history of medicine and history of education to meet with un/underexplored topics, there is space for a more sustained dialogue between the two fields given some of the shared theoretical and methodological trajectories that have been (briefly) discussed in this paper. Sharing a common lineage in practitioner-led histories, both historians of medicine and historians of education have developed sensitive readings and new insights into how to approach issues of agency, literacy (broadly defined) and voice. It is perhaps, time, therefore, for a more comprehensive and thorough examination of the shared genealogy of the two fields.

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Laura Newman

Laura Newman is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at King’s College London, where she is working on the Wellcome-funded Addressing Health: Morbidity, Mortality and Occupational Health in the Victorian and Edwardian Post Office. Before this she was Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Mobile Museum: Economic Botany in Circulation project at RHUL/Kew Gardens. Her first book – Germs in the English Workplace, c.1880-1939 – was published in 2021 by Routledge.

Notes

¹ See for example Annemieke Van Drenth, ‘Doctors, Philanthropists and Teachers as “True” Ventriloquists? Introduction to a Special Issue on the History of Special Education’, History of Education 34, no. 2 (2005): 107–17; Margret A. Winzer, ‘Confronting Difference: An Excursion through the History of Special Education’, in The SAGE Handbook of Special Education Vol. 1, ed. Lani Florian (Newbury: SAGE, 2007), 21–33.

² Alysa Levene, ‘Children’s Health in Public and Private, 1700 to 1950’, in Healthcare in Private and Public from the Early Modern Period to 2000, ed. Paul Weindling (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 36–57.

³ Keir Waddington, Medical Education at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, 1123–1995 (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2003), 2–4.

⁴ See John V. Pickstone, ‘The Development and Present State of the History of Medicine in Britain’, Dynamis 19 (1999): 457–86.

⁵ See for example Susan C. Lawrence, ‘Entrepreneurs and Private Enterprise: The Development of Medical Lecturing in London, 1775–1820’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 62, no. 2 (1988): 171–92.

⁶ In the Australian case see Bob Bessant, ‘“Progress” and Revision in the History of Education in the 1980s’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 12, no. 1 (1991): 67–84.

⁷ See for example the chapters in Sjaak Braster, Ian Grosvenor and Maria del Mar del Pozo Andrés, eds., The Black Box of Schooling: A Cultural History of the Classroom (Brussels: PIE Peter Lang, 2011).

⁸ On the history of medicine, see for example Pickstone, ‘History of Medicine in Britain’; Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner, eds., Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein, eds., Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). On the history of education see for example Gary McCulloch, The Struggle for the History of Education (London: Routledge, 2011); Thomas S. Popewitz, ed., Rethinking the History of Education: Transnational Perspectives on Its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge (London: Springer, 2013).

⁹ Bonner, Becoming a Physician; Laura Kelly, Irish Medical Education and Student Culture, c.1850–1950 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018).

¹⁰ Ruth Watts, ‘Universities, Medical Education and Women: Birmingham in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, History of Education 42, no. 3 (2013): 306–19.

¹¹ Anne M. Crowther and Marguerite W. Dupree, Medical Lives in the Age of Surgical Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 20–36.

¹² Kelly, Irish Medical Education, 75–6.

¹³ Eugenia Pacitti, ‘Dissecting the Student Experience at Australian Medical Schools, 1884–1912’, Social History of Medicine 34, no. 2 (2021): 12.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Catherine Sloan, ‘“Periodicals of an Objectionable Character”: Peers and Periodicals at Croydon Friends’ School, 1826–1875’, Victorian Periodicals Review 50, no. 4 (2017): 771.

¹⁶ Ibid., 777.

¹⁷ For more on medical education and student print culture see Alison Moulds, Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s–1910s (London: Palgrave, 2021), ch. 1.

¹⁸ Rob Boddice, The Science of Sympathy: Mortality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilisation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 75–86.

¹⁹ Lynda Payne, With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2007).

²⁰ Agnes Arnold-Forster, ‘Operating with Emotions: Feeling in Contemporary Surgery’, Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 100, no. 1 (2018): 14.

²¹ See for example Joakhim Landahl, ‘Emotions, Power, and the Advent of Mass Schooling’, Paedagogica Historica 51, no. 1–2 (2015): 104–16.

²² Mona Gleason, ‘Metaphor, Materiality, and Method: The Central Role of Embodiment in the History of Education’, Paedagogica Historica 54, no. 1–2 (2018): 13.

²³ John Harley Warner, ‘The Aesthetic Grounding of Modern Medicine’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88, no. 1 (2014): 10.

²⁴ Ibid., 16–17.

²⁵ See Ian Grosvenor, ‘From the “Eye of History” to “a Second Gaze”: The Visual Archive and the Marginalized in the History of Education’, History of Education 36, no. 4–5 (2007): 607–22.

²⁶ A notable exception is Tesseyman, Sheri, Jane Brooks and Christine Hallett, ‘Nurses and Surgical Dressers: Medical Students’ Impact on Hospital Nursing Work in Philadelphia and London, 1870 to 1910’, Nursing History Review 29, no. 1 (2020): 117–41.

²⁷ See for example Claire L. Jones, Marguerite Dupree, Iain Hutchison, Susan Gardiner and Anne Marie Rafferty, ‘Personalities, Preferences and Practicalities: Educating Nurses in Wound Sepsis in the British Hospital, 1870–1920’, Social History of Medicine 31, no. 3 (2018): 577–604.

²⁸ Heggie, ‘Women Doctors and Lady Nurses’, 287.

²⁹ Anne Marie Rafferty, The Politics of Nursing Knowledge (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), 55.

³⁰ Carol Helmstadter and Judith Godden, Nursing Before Nightingale, 1815–1899 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 16.

³¹ Kristine Swenson, Medical Women and Victorian Fiction (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), ch. 2.

³² Carol Helmstadter, ‘“A Real Tone”: Professionalizing Nursing in Nineteenth-Century London’, Nursing History Review 11 (2003): 3–30.

³³ Agnes Arnold-Forster, ‘Racing Pulses: Gender, Professionalism and Health Care in Medical Romance Fiction’, History Workshop Journal 91, no. 1 (2021): 165.

³⁴ Adrian Bingham, Lucy Delap, Louise Jackson and Louise Settle, ‘Historical Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales: The Role of Historians’, History of Education 45, no. 4 (2016): 412.

³⁵ David J. Hirst, ‘A Medical “Dead End” Job? The Recruitment and Career Progression of the Edwardian School Medical Officer’, Medical History 44, no. 4 (2000): 450.

³⁶ Mona Gleason, ‘Race Class and Health: School Medical Inspection and “Healthy” Children in British Columbia, 1890–1930’, in Children’s Health Issues in Historical Perspective, ed. Cheryl Krasnick Warsh and Veronica Strong Boag (Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2005), 287–304.

³⁷ David Kirk, ‘Health, the Body and the Medicalisation of the School’, Counterpoints 62 (1999): 163–80.

³⁸ Nelleke Bakker, ‘School Medical Inspection and the “Healthy” Child in the Netherlands, 1904–1970’, History of Education Review 46 (2017): 164–77.

³⁹ Gleason, ‘Race, Class and Health’, 290.

⁴⁰ Philippa Levine and Alison Basford, ‘Eugenics and the Modern World’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Phillipa Levine and Alison Bashford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 10.

⁴¹ Kellie Burns, Helen Proctor and Heather Weaver, ‘Modern Schooling and the Curriculum of the Body’, in Handbook of Historical Studies in Education: Debates, Tensions, and Directions, ed. Tanya Fitzgerald (Singapore: Springer, 2019), 4.

⁴² Ibid., 5.

⁴³ Ibid., 18.

⁴⁴ Though it should be noted, of course, that these are not mutually exclusive categories.

⁴⁵ For more on the background to this literature see Kristine Alexander, ‘Childhood and Colonialism in Canadian History’, History Compass 14, no. 9 (2016): 397–406.

⁴⁶ Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonising Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900–50 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998), 63.

⁴⁷ Ibid., ch. 4.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 99–105.

⁴⁹ For more on this see Alexander, ‘Childhood and Colonialism in Canadian History’.

⁵⁰ Amy Bombay, Kimberly Matheson and Hymie Anisman, ‘The Intergenerational Effects of Indian Residential Schools: Implications for the Concept of Historical Trauma’, Transcultural Psychiatry 51, no. 3 (2014): 320–38.

⁵¹ See Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015); Erika Dyck, ‘Doing History that Matters: Going Public and Activating Voices as a Form of Historical Activism’, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 57, no. 1 (2021): 75–86.

⁵² Mona Gleason, ‘“Lost Voices, Lost Bodies”? Doctors and the Embodiment of Children and Youth in English Canada from 1900 to the 1940s’, in Lost Kids: Vulnerable Children and Youth in Twentieth Century Canada and the United States, ed. Mona Gleason, Tamara Myers, Leslie Paris and Veronica Strong Boag (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 137.

⁵³ Geert Thyssen, ‘Visualizing Discipline of the Body in a German Open‐Air School (1923–1939): Retrospection and Introspection’, History of Education 36, no. 2 (2007): 257.

⁵⁴ Levene, ‘Children’s Health’, 48–50.

⁵⁵ Siân Pooley, ‘Parenthood, Citizenship and the State in England, c.1870–1914’, in Parenting and the State in Britain and Europe, c.1870–1950, ed. Hester Barron and Claudia Siebrecht (London: Palgrave, 2017), 25–48.

⁵⁶ For further see Disabled Children: Contested Caring, 1850–1979, ed. Anne Borsay and Pamela Dale (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012).

⁵⁷ Nadja Durbach, ‘“They Might as Well Brand Us”: Working-Class Resistance to Compulsory Vaccination in Victorian England’, Social History of Medicine 13, no. 1 (2000): 45–63.

⁵⁸ Burns et al., ‘The Curriculum of the Body’, 5.

⁵⁹ Durbach references schoolmistresses as members of anti-vaccination societies: Durbach, ‘”They Might as Well Brand Us”’, 47.

⁶⁰ Hester Barron, ‘Parents, Teachers and Children’s Wellbeing in London, 1918–1939’, in Barron and Siebrecht, Parenting and the State, 147–52.

⁶¹ Stephen Petrina, ‘The Medicalisation of Education: A Historiographic Synthesis’, History of Education Quarterly 46, no. 4 (2006): 530.

⁶² Ibid., 529.

⁶³ A number of works relating to the history of surgical instruments serve as key case examples. See Ghislaine Lawrence, ‘The Ambiguous Artifact: Surgical Instruments and the Surgical Past’, in Medical Theory, Surgical Practice, ed. Christopher Lawrence (Abingdon: Routledge, 1992), 295–314; Liba Taub, ‘Re-engaging with Instruments’, Isis 102, no. 4 (2011): 689–96; Claire L. Jones, ‘Surgical Instruments: History and Historiography’, in The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Surgery, ed. Thomas Schlich (London: Palgrave, 2018), 235–257.

⁶⁴ See Ian Grosvenor, Martin Lawn and Kate Rousmaniere, eds., Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom (New York: Peter Lang, 1999); Martin Lawn and Ian Grosvenor, eds., Materialities of Schooling: Design, Technology, Objects, Routines (Oxford: Symposium: 2005); Catherine Burke, Peter Cunningham and Ian Grosvenor, ‘“Putting Education in its Place”: Space, Place and Materialities in the History of Education’, History of Education 39, no. 6 (2010): 677–80.

⁶⁵ Pedro L. Martinez, ‘History of School Desk Development in Terms of Hygiene and Pedagogy in Spain (1838–1936)’, in Materialities of Schooling: Design, Technology, Objects, Routines, ed. Ian Grosvenor and Martin Lawn (Oxford: Symposium Books, 2005), 71–95.

⁶⁶ As Berridge recounts, Devon Educational Committee refused to distribute anti-smoking leaflets distributed in 1962 by the Central Council in Health Education due to the ‘beatnik language’ used: Virginia Berridge, Marketing Health: Smoking and the Discourse of Public Health in Britain, 1945–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 73.

⁶⁷ Alex Mold and Hannah Elizabeth discuss how anxieties surrounding the effects of comic books on young minds contributed to the differential reception of anti-smoking materials in schools featuring Superman and his nemesis ‘Nick O’Teen’ in 1980s Britain. See Alex Mold and Hannah Elizabeth, ‘Superman vs. Nick O’Teen: Anti-smoking Campaigns and Children in 1980s Britain’, Palgrave Communications 5, no. 1 (2019): 4.

⁶⁸ Martin Lawn and Ian Grosvenor, ‘“When in Doubt, Preserve”: Exploring the Traces of Teaching and Material Culture in English Schools’, History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 117–27.

⁶⁹ Alex Mold, Peder Clark, Gareth Millward and Daisy Payling, Placing the Public in Public Health in Post-War Britain, 1948–2012 (London: Springer Nature, 2019), 4.

⁷⁰ For an early introduction, see Arthur L. Caplan, ‘The Concepts of Health, Illness, and Disease’, in The Companion Encyclopaedia of the History of Medicine Volume 1–2, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 233–248.

⁷¹ See Gary McCulloch and Tom Woodin, ‘Towards a Social History of Learners and Learning’, Oxford Review of Education 36 (2010): 133–40.

⁷² Claire Hooker and Hans Pols, ‘Health, Medicine, and the Media’, Health and History 8, no. 2 (2006): 5.

⁷³ Anne McClintock, ‘Soft-Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising (1994)’, in The Body: A Reader, ed. Miriam Fraser and Monica Greco (London: Routledge, 2005), 507.

⁷⁴ Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 117.

⁷⁵ Virginia Berridge and Kelly Loughlin, ‘Smoking and the New Health Education in Britain 1950s–1970s’, American Journal of Public Health 95, no. 6 (2005): 956.

⁷⁶ Berridge, Marketing Health, 74.

⁷⁷ Ilana Lӧwy, A Woman’s Disease: The History of Cervical Cancer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 114–23.

⁷⁸ Mold et al., Placing the Public, 5.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 67.

⁸⁰ Jonathan Rose, ‘The History of Education as the History of Reading’, History of Education 36, no. 4–5 (2007): 595.

⁸¹ Heather Ellis, ‘Editorial: Science, Technologies and Material Culture in the History of Education’, History of Education 46, no. 2 (2017): 143.

⁸² Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale: Yale University Press, 2010 ed.), 206–20.

⁸³ Claire L. Jones, ‘Under the Covers? Commerce, Contraceptives and Consumers in England and Wales, 1880–1960’, Social History of Medicine 29, no. 4 (2015): 734–56.

⁸⁴ Rima D. Apple, ‘“Training” the Baby: Mothers’ Responses to Advice Literature in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, in When Science Encounters the Child: Education, Parenting, and Child Welfare in Twentieth Century America, ed. Barbara Beatty, Emily D. Cahan and Julia Grant (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006), 195–214.

⁸⁵ Angela Davis, ‘“When I was young you just went and asked your mother”: The Changing Role of Friends and Kin in the Transmission of Knowledge about Maternity in post-1945 Britain’, in The Transmission of Health Practices, c.1500–2000, ed. Martin Dinges and Robert Jütte (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2011), 15–34.

⁸⁶ Mark Freeman, ‘Adult Education History in Britain: Past, Present and Future (Part II)’, Paedagogica Historica 56, no. 3 (2020): 396–411.

⁸⁷ Roy Porter, ‘The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from below’, Theory and Society 14, no. 2 (1985): 182.

⁸⁸ See for example Suellen Hoy’s study into cleanliness and the ‘Americanization’ of immigrant labour in Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 137–40.

⁸⁹ See for example Arthur McIvor, ‘Germs at Work: Establishing Tuberculosis as an Occupational Disease in Britain, c.1900–1951’, Social History of Medicine 25, no. 4 (2012): 812–29.

⁹⁰ To pick just some examples from the case of the British mining industry, see Arthur McIvor and Ronald Johnston, Miners’ Lung: A History of Dust Disease in British Coal Mining (London: Routledge, 2007); Joseph Melling, ‘Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt? Experts, Lay Knowledge, and the Role of Radiography in the Diagnosis of Silicosis in Britain, c.1919–1945’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2010): 424–66; Catherine Mills, Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800–1914 (London: Ashgate, 2010); Daniel Blackie and David M. Turner, Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British Coalmining, 1780–1880 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

⁹¹ Maxine Schwartz Seller, ‘Boundaries, Bridges, and the History of Education’, History of Education Quarterly 31, no. 2 (1991): 96.

⁹² Ibid.

⁹³ Petrina, ‘Medicalisation’.

⁹⁴ An exception being John Field, Working Men’s Bodies: Work Camps in Britain, 1880–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); see also Waltraud Ernst, ed., Work, Psychiatry and Society, c.1750–2015 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

⁹⁵ On informal education and the issue of sources see Andrew Grunzke, ‘The History of Formal and Informal Education’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education, ed. John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 534–553.

⁹⁶ Virginia Berridge, ‘“Hidden from History”? Oral History and the History of Health Policy’, Oral History 38, no. 1 (2010): 91–100.