From 1948 the World Health Organization expected child hygiene to include mental health. This article discusses the way school doctors adapted their activities and concerns accordingly in the mid-twentieth century in an agrarian-industrial area of the Netherlands. In spite of an improvement in pupils' physical health they shifted their attention…

As elsewhere in the Western world, between 1900 and 1940 the anti-tuberculosis campaign in the Netherlands produced a wide range of initiatives to promote child health. In each of these the social and the medical were linked, as the hygienic "mood" was encouraged by a child-saving ethos that focused upon the poor. In this article the…