Children, Medicine, and the Built Environment of Early Twentieth-Century Toronto

Abstract

The public health movement from the 1880s to the early years of the twentieth century was active in children's health and education in North American cities. Focusing on the City of Toronto, this article suggests that activities associated with the public health movement—the preoccupation with sanitation and health inspection, the building of clinics and special classrooms, and the emphasis on organized play and playgrounds—were forces in the process of the medicalization of education and encompassed strategies employed to confront social anxieties about difference (e.g., bodies, abilities, race, poverty) during a time of massive population growth and urban transformation.