Physiologists, physicians, and physical educators: Nineteenth century biology and exercise, hygienic and educative*

Abstract

When W.M. Conant (out-patient surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital) addressed the Boston Society for Medical Improvement in 1894 he spoke for many of his contemporaries when he declared that the two aims of exercise were the hygienic and the educative. The former was concerned primarily with muscular, circulatory and digestive functions. The latter emphasized the nervous system, brain and by extension ‘the mind’; how the organism grew; and how ‘character’ was formed. Growing interest in such matters was fostered by a recognition of the need to improve the nation's health and was facilitated by developments in the biological sciences. Expansionist tendencies and a perceived need for strong, virile and resolute leaders also became factors. Whereas systemized forms of gymnastics might be valuable, sports such as rowing, baseball and football were deemed to be more so. For those physicians, physiologists, and others who emphasized hygienic and educative (sometimes referred to as educational) goals, the new gospel of strenuous activity partook of, yet differed from, the glorified accounts of athletics that appeared in the popular press. They, too, stressed physical vigour and ‘moral courage’ but within limits not to be exceeded by an overemphasis on ‘contest victory’. United States Commissioner of Education William T. Harris, whose remarks had opened the well-attended 1889 Boston Conference on Physical Training, was among many who considered physical education, then a new profession dedicated to the study and care of the body and aimed at the perfection of the individual, to be important. Developments in evolutionary biology, physiological psychology and especially psychological studies such as G. Stanley Hall and his students began to produce in the 1890s were significant in moving physical education increasingly towards a psycho-social orientation by 1906.