Book Review.

I n Classrooms and Clinics: Urban Schools and the Protection and Promo­ tion of Child Health, 1870-1930, historian Richard A . Meckel provides current historians of medicine, education, and child welfare with what he accurately describes as a "comprehensive history and analysis" of late nineteenth and early twentieth century attempts to provide health services to underserved children through public schools. These efforts took place within the context of a growing "sociomedical and educa­ tional discourse" of school hygiene that provided inspiration for the development of a wide range of new programs and policies (p. 2). T h i s discourse, and the school hygiene movement that accompanied it, made public schools—in particular urban public schools—a site of ongoing negotiations regarding the extent to which the school, and therefore the state, was responsible for the physical and mental health of the vast numbers of children who were now required by law to attend it (pp. 2-4) . Meckel shows how, as these negotiations progressed from 1880 to 1930, schools first added a variety of new health-focused ser­ vices, programs, and personnel to their repertoires, and then eliminated or curtailed much of what they had established, ultimately shifting the responsibility for children's health to patents and limiting the provision of health-related services primarily to the private sector. Meckel intentionally focused this study on urban primary schools and school children because they were the "first and dominant concern of school hygienists" (p. 8). Though some school hygiene reform activ­ ities took place outside of this context, it was in the urban setting that concerns about school children were most salient due to connections made to broader anxieties about the potentially negative impact of ur­ ban industrial life on the mental and physical health of city residents, children in particular. Furthermore, because secondary school atten­ dance was optional, the population overall was significandy smaller, and contained few children of poor or working-class families; thus, the challenge of meeting the needs of children with physical and mental health challenges, a great concern of school hygienists, was minimized in that setting (pp. 8-9). I n six chapters and an epilogue, Classrooms and Clinics traces the de­ velopment "the school hygiene discourse and attendant reform move­ ment" through four "overlapping stages" and follows the legacy of these efforts into the following decades (p. 6). Chapter 1 chronicles the first