JIARU XU

This paper discusses the process of which school clinics were established and how school clinics provided medical services for school children through the analysis of examinations and diagnoses conducted on them by the Public Health Bureau (PHB). Previous researches on school hygiene in Shanghai have elucidated that PHB emphasized hygiene education in schools and the promotion of children’s health played an important part in administrative tasks. However, they have not explained in detail how facilities such as school clinics were administered and managed after school hygiene was systematically established. Based on above, this study examined school hygiene implementation by analyzing plans issued by the administration, reports of ophthalmologic and dental clinics, and correspondence between PHB, schools and families. With the issuance of the plan by Nanking National Government, PHB developed its own school hygiene plan based on it, and thus doctors, nurses, and school clinics were formally introduced into Shanghai public schools. Noteworthy in the plan are the ophthalmologic and dental clinics operated by PHB, which provided preventive interventions and simple treatments for students, connected with parents to ensure the smooth running of the school hygiene, and dispatched nurses who visited children in their homes. Above all, school hygiene was not only about imparting health knowledge, but was also integrated with medical care and emergency services under the needs of nation-building and disease-control. In this way, how the connection between the educational system and the medical management system was created around children’s bodies in Shanghai at that time was clarified.

This study focuses on the Hygiene Campaign in Shanghai at the end of the 1920s, and by clarifying the actual participation of schools in the Hygiene Campaign, revealing that schools played a role in the indoctrination of the people while being incorporated into the Hygiene Campaign of the Shanghai authorities. With the official establishment of the Shanghai Municipal Government in July 1927, the Public Health Bureau (PHB) began to address various health and hygiene issues in Shanghai society, and the Hygiene Campaign was one of its projects. Under the philosophy of improving sanitary conditions and revitalizing the nation, the PHB’s Hygiene Campaign aimed to indoctrinate the general public, and it can be seen that they attempted to transmit hygienic knowledge and raise the public’s awareness of hygiene through the development of “entertainment” activities by pupils who were considered as “future citizens. Children appeared as a “medium” who conveyed hygienic knowledge to the people through their body movements and dialogues, and at the same time, the students themselves had the opportunity to be injected with hygienic knowledge. Through the activity of yugei play in the first campaign, this paper reveals the duality of the school in hygiene education.