Promoting school efficiency: Dutch school doctors and the meaning of child health (1930-1970)

This paper explores the meaning of child health as applied by Dutch school doctors and the way it was adapted to the rapidly improving standard of living and the increasing importance of mental health after World War II. It focuses on both the national discourse and school doctors’ daily activities. For the latter the countryside of the Province of Groningen, a relatively poor area, is chosen. Despite assertions that their profession subscribed to a new, positive and inclusive, concept of health, introduced by the WHO in 1948, the Groningen school doctors continued to use a negative concept of a “healthy” schoolchild until well after world War II. It was a child that was not bothered by diseases or infirmities or any other “abnormalities”. They clung to the original aim of school medical inspection: the promotion of the school’s efficiency by the reduction of possible dangers threatening pupils’ learning capacity. In the postwar years these threats were more often found in an unfavorable school climate, with too large classes and too much intellectual work, producing “mental overburdening”. In doing so they made their concept of health more inclusive by linking up physical and mental health.