Child guidance in interwar Scotland: International influences and domestic concerns

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Volumn 80, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 513-539

  Stewart, John W ^a  

^a OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Child guidance; Commonwealth Fund; International mental hygiene; Psychiatry; Psychology; Scotland

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749680566     PISSN: 00075140     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/bhm.2006.0117     Document Type: Review

References (141)

1. Roger Cooler, "In the Name of the Child Beyond," in Cultures of Child Health in Britain and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century, ed. Marijke Gijswit-Hofstra and Hilary Marland (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 287-96, on pp. 288-89.
2. Judith Sealander, "The History of Childhood Policy: A Philippic's Wish List," J. Policy Hist., 2004, 16 (2): 175-87, on p. 179.
3. On which see A. McGehee Harvey and Susan L. Abrams, "For the Welfare of Mankind": The Commonwealth Fund and American Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
4. For historical analysis of child guidance in Scotland and in Britain, see Lynn Abrams, The Orphan Country: Children of Scotland's Broken Homes from 1845 to the Present Day (Edinburgh: Donald, 1998);
5. Harry Hendrick, Child Welfare: Historical Dimensions, Contemporary Debate (Bristol: Policy Press, 2003);
6. Adrian Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c. 1860-c. 1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
7. Deborah Thom, "Wishes, Anxieties, Play and Gestures: Child Guidance in Inter- war England," in In the Name of the Child, ed. Roger Cooter (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 200-219.
8. See Harry Oosterhuis, "Insanity and Other Discomforts: A Century of Outpatient Psychiatry and Mental Health Care in the Netherlands, 1900-2000," in Psychiatric Cultures Compared: Psychiatry and Mental Health in the Twentieth Century, ed. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), pp. 73-102;
9. Jean-Christophe Coffin, "'Misery' and 'Revolution': The Organisation of French Psychiatry, 1900-1980," Psychiatric Cultures Compared: Psychiatry and Mental Health in the Twentieth Century, ibid., pp. 225-47.
10. Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind (n. 4), p. 147.
11. Liverpool Child Guidance Council, Report for 1933, [1934], p. 25, University of Liverpool, Archives and Special Collections, E X 65: 33, Liverpool.
12. Theresa R. Richardson, The Century of the Child: The Mental Hygiene Movement and Social Policy in the United States and Canada (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 2.
13. Heather Munro Prescott, A Doctor of Their Own: The History of Adolescent Medicine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 23.
14. Adolf Meyer, The Collected Papers of Adolf Meyer, ed. Eunice Winters, vol. 4, Mental Hygiene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1952), p. 258.
15. On Meyer's impact on British psychiatry, see Michael Gelder, "Adolf Meyer and His Influence on British Psychiatry," in 150 Years of British Psychiatry, ed. German E. Berrios and Hugh Freeman (London: Athlone, 1991), pp. 419-35.
16. Notre Dame Child Guidance Clinic; Annual Report, 1933-34 (Glasgow: Notre Dame Child Guidance Clinic, [1934]), p. 4, Corporation of Glasgow, D-TC 7/7/13, Mitchell Library, Glasgow (hereafter, Mitchell Library).
17. Notre Dame Child Guidance Clinic; Annual Report, 1933-34 Ibid.
18. Kelly Boyd, "Sir David Kennedy Henderson," in The New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press/British Academy, 2004).
19. D. K. Henderson, "Social Psychiatry: Being the Morison Lectures for 1931 at the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh - Lecture I," Edinburgh Med. J., 1931, 38 (5): 289-306, on p. 291.
20. D. K. Henderson, "Social Psychiatry: Being the Morison Lectures for 1931 at the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh - Lecture II," Edinburgh Med. J., 1931, 38 (6): 359-78, on p. 367.
21. D. K. Henderson, "Social Psychiatry: Being the Morison Lectures for 1931 at the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh - Lecture III," Edinburgh Med. J., 1931, 38 (7): 414-38, on p. 419.
22. Edinburgh Med. J., Ibid., p. 421.
23. Edinburgh Med. J., Ibid.
24. Evelyn Fox to the Commonwealth Fund, 26 March 1929, box 2, folder 15, Commonwealth Fund Archives, ser. 16, English Mental Hygiene Program (hereafter, CFA 16), Rockefeller Archive Center, New York, N.Y. (hereafter, RAC).
25. Mildred Scoville to Fox, 4 October 1929, CFA 16, box 5, folder 51.
26. Norah Milnes to Scoville, 28 July 1930, CFA 16, box 21, folder 237.
27. On relative autonomy, see Lindsay Paterson, The Autonomy of Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994).
28. Graham Richards, "Britain on the Couch: The Popularization of Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1918-1940," Sci. Context, 2000, 13 (2): 183-230, on pp. 187-88.
29. David Yellowlees, "Some Aspects of Mental Hygiene," Glasgow Med. J., 1931, 116 (5): 267-76, on p. 274.
30. Glasgow Med. J., Ibid.
31. Nikolas Rose, The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England, 1869-1939 (London: Rouuedge & Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 202.
32. On psychiatric social workers and child guidance, see John Stewart, "'I Thought You Would Want to Come and See His Home ...': Child Guidance and Psychiatric Social Work in Inter-War Britain," in Home, Heredity, and Hygiene: Historical Perspectives, ed. Mark Jackson (London: Routledge, forthcoming). On the profession in the United States,
33. see Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), chap. 3;
34. Daniel J. Walkowitz, "The Making of a Feminine Professional Identity: Social Workers in the 1920s," Amer. Hist. Rev., 1990, 97:1051-75;
35. Joseph M. Gabriel, "Mass-Producing the Individual: Mary C. Jarrett, Elmer E. Southard, and the Industrial Origins of Psychiatric Social Work," Bull. Hist. Med., 2005, 79: 430-58.
36. See, e.g., M. A. Lane, "The Place of the Social Worker in Mental Health," Ment. Hyg., 1939, 5 (4): 132-36.
37. Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind (n. 4), p. 149.
38. Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind, Ibid.
39. Thorn, "Wishes" (n, 4), pp. 204-5.
40. On the creation, in the United States, of the child guidance "team" and the eventual dominance of psychiatry, see Kathleen W. Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), chap. 3 and pp. 202-3.
41. On the "defeat" of psychology in American child guidance clinics, see also Leila Zenderland, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 306.
42. Steve Sturdy and Roger Cooter, "Science, Scientific Management, and the Transformation of Medicine in Britain, c. 1870-1950," Hist. Sci., 1998, 36: 421-66.
43. Hendrick, Child Welfare (n. 4), chap. 1 and passim.
44. On this distancing, see Mathew Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain, 1870-1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
45. Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child (n. 31).
46. Ronald G. Gordon, "Address to Mothers: The Dangerous Age of Childhood," Mother & Child, 1938 (9): 80-85.
47. Undated (but ca. 1940) list of child guidance clinics recognized by the Child Guidance Council/clinics represented on the Scottish Association for Mental Hygiene, Archives of the Association of Psychiatric Social Workers (hereafter, AAPSW), MSS.378, 20/5, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, Coventry.
48. On child guidance in the United States, see Margo Horn, Before It's Too Late: The Child. Guidance Movement in the United States, 1922-1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989);
49. Horn, "The Moral Message of Child Guidance, 1925-1945," J. Soc. Hist., 1984, 18; 25-36;
50. Hamilton Cravens, "Child-Saving in the Age of Professionalism, 1915-1930," in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook, ed. Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 415-88;
51. Richardson, Century of the Child (n. 8);
52. Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child (n. 31).
53. George Stevenson cited in Robert Brenner, ed., Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, vol. 2, 1866-1932 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 1055. Stevenson was director of the Division on Community Clinics, National Committee for Mental Hygiene.
54. Cravens, "Child-Saving" (n. 38), p. 462.
55. Daniel M. Fox and Marcia L. Meldrum, "Edward Stephen Harkness," in American National Biography, vol. 10 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 87.
56. David C. Hammack, "Failure and Resilience: Pushing the Limits in Depression and Wartime," in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, ed. Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 263-80, on p. 274.
57. On the internationalism of American philanthropy, see Emily S. Rosenberg, "Missions to the World: Philanthropy Abroad," Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, ibid., pp. 241-57.
58. Ministry of Health, Report of the Committee on Social Workers in the Mental Health Services, Cmnd. 8260 (London: HMSO, 1951), p. 11.
59. "Report Presented to the Child Guidance Council by the Signatories, Who Visited the United States to Enquire into the Working of the Child Guidance Clinics" [n.d., but late 1920s], p. 5, Papers of Professor Sir Cyril Burt, D.191/20/1/7, University of Liverpool, Archives and Special Collections, Liverpool.
60. Thom, "Wishes" (n. 4), p. 207.
61. Child Guidance Council to William Beveridge, LSE, 31 January 1929, regarding the formal application for this course to be set up, Central Filing Registry/514/1/A, Archives of the London School of Economics and Political Science, British Library of Political and Economic Science, London (hereafter, LSE). On the experiences of some of these British visitors, see "Far Away and Long Ago," Brit. J. Psychiat. Soc. Work, 1954, 2 (10): 9-11.
62. Commonwealth Fund, The Commonwealth Fund: Thirteenth Annual Report (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1932), p. 43.
63. John Bowlby, "The Rediscovery of the Family," in Notre Dame Child Guidance Clinic and Adolescent Unit, Rediscovery of the Family and Other Lectures: Sister Marie Hilda Lectures 1954-1973 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1981), pp. 1-7, on p. 1.
64. Sister Jude (Maureen McAleer), Freedom to Grow: Sister Marie Hilda's Vision of Child Guidance (Glasgow: Burns, 1981), p. 16.
65. "Report of the Session 1928-29" and "Report on Session 1929-30," Notre Dame Training College, Glasgow: Minute Book (hereafter, Notre Dame Minute Book), Glasgow University Archives and Business Records Centre, Glasgow (heareafter, GUABRC), UGC 58/1/2/1.
66. On the transatlantic nature of social thought and action in the era more generally, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
67. Sir Douglas Kennedy Henderson, The Evolution of Psychiatry in Scotland (Edinburgh: Livingstone, 1964), pp. 140-67.
68. Karl Bowman, Boston Psychopathic Hospital, to Lawson Lowrey, Institute for Child Guidance, New York, 4 December 1931, box 4, folder 46, Correspondence October to December 1931, Commonwealth Fund, ser. 25.2, Mental Hygiene Program, RAC.
69. Sister Jude, Freedom to Grow (n. 49), pp. 19-20;
70. Report of the Child Guidance Council 1934/35, including handwritten annotations, CFA 16, box 1, folder 2;
71. MacCalman's application for General Secretary of the Child Guidance Council, 1935, Report of the Child Guidance Council 1934/35 ibid., box 3, folder 29;
72. MacCalman to Barry Smith, Commonwealth Fund, 24 March 1936, Report of the Child Guidance Council 1934/35 ibid., box 3, folder 30;
73. memorandum, "History of the Negotiations Leading to the Amalgamation between the Scottish Child Guidance Council and the Scottish Association for Mental Welfare" [n.d., but prob. 1938], Report of the Child Guidance Council 1934/35 ibid., box 7, folder 77.
74. For further references to MacCalman's life and work, see John Stewart, "The Most Precious Possession of a Nation Is Its Children': The Clyde Committee on Homeless Children in Scotland," Scot. Econ. &Soc. Hist., 2001, 21: 43-66.
75. "Report of the Meeting of the Committee of Management, 21 Sept. 1931" and "Report on Session 1931-32," Notre Dame Minute Book, GUABRC, UGC 58/1/2/1;
76. "Survey of the Work of the Child Guidance Council, July-November 1931," CFA 16, box 4, folder 46.
77. Sister Jude, Freedom to Grow (n. 49), p. 17.
78. R. K. McKnight, "The Development of Child Guidance Services," in Special Education in Scotland, ed. W. Bryan Dockrell, W. R. Dunne, and Alastair Milne (Edinburgh: Scottish Council for Research in Education, 1978), pp. 97-109, on p. 98.
79. "Survey of the Work of the Council for the month of October 1934," CFA 16, box 5, folder 47.
80. "Survey of the Work of the Child Guidance Council, December 1931," CFA 16, box 4, folder 46.
81. Child Guidance Council to Scoville, 11 August 1934, CFA 16, box 6, folder 60.
82. Mildred Scoville, Commonwealth Fund, to R. G. Gordon, Medical Director, London Child Guidance Clinic, 21 July 1938, CFA 16, box 3, folder 32.
83. Minutes of a Meeting of the Executive Committee of the Child Guidance Council, 12 October 1938, CFA 16, box 7, folder 77.
84. Child Guidance Council to Scoville, 26 May 1936, CFA 16, box 6, folder 61.
85. Minutes of a Meeting of the Child Guidance Council, 28 October 1929, CFA 16, box 7, folder 70;
86. "Mental Health Course: Report to the Commonwealth Fund, July 1940," Minutes of A Meeting of the Child Guidance Council ibid., box 16, folder 167.
87. Minutes of the Attendance and Administration Sub-Committee, 2 November 1939, Appendix I, Education Committee of the Council of Lanark, CO1/5/3/10, Mitchell Library.
88. Sir Alexander Mcgregor, Public Health in Glasgow, 1905-1946 (Edinburgh: Livingstone, 1967), p. 133.
89. "Report on Session 1938-39," Notre Dame Minute Book, GUABRC, UGC 58/1/2/2.
90. "Report on Session 1934-35," ibid., UGC 58/1/2/1.
91. Commonwealth Fund, The Commonwealth Fund: Fourteenth Annual Report (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1933), p. 56.
92. Mental Health Course Consultative Committee, Minutes, 5 November 1935, LSE, Minutes of School Committees/16/8.
93. M. D. L. Dickson, Child Guidance (London: Sands, 1938), p. 10.
94. Child Guidance Ibid., p. 21.
95. Ibid., preface.
96. Henryk Misiak and Virginia M. Staudt, Catholics in Psychology: A Historical Survey (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954), chap. 14 and p. 282.
97. Sister Jude, Freedom To Grow (n. 49), p. 17.
98. Freedom to Grow Ibid., p. 35.
99. Clifford Williamson, "'An Antidote to Communism': Catholic Social Action in Glasgow, 1931-1939," in Out of the Ghetto? The Catholic Community in Modern Scotland, ed. Raymond Boyle and Peter Lynch (Edinburgh: Donald, 1998), pp. 11-41.
100. "Report on Session 1931-32," Notre Dame Minute Book, GUABRC, UGC 58/1/2/1.
101. Glasgow Observer, 10 October 1931, p. 3.
102. Glasgow Observer Ibid.
103. Child Guidance Council to Scoville, letter and report, 22 April 1932, CFA 16, box 5, folder 56.
104. The Catholic Directory for Scotland, 1932 (Edinburgh: Chisholm, 1932), p. 245.
105. MacCalman to Scoville, 12 July 1935, CFA 16, box 6, folder 61.
106. For a broader discussion of religion and psychological thought in interwar Britain, see Graham Richards, "Psychology and the Churches in Britain, 1919-1939: Symptoms of Conversion," Hist. Hum. Sci., 2000, 13: 57-84.
107. Memorandum, Graham Taylor, Director of Publications Department, Commonwealth Fund, to Barry Smith, 6 February 1933, CFA 16, box 6, folder 58.
108. Edward Mapother, Psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, London, to Barry Smith, Commonwealth Fund, 25 September 1930, CFA 16, box 22, folder 249.
109. On British psychiatric social workers and sexuality, see Stewart, "I Thought You Would Want" (n. 27).
110. Doris Robinson, Secretary, London Child Guidance Clinic, to Scoville, 17 April 1934, CFA 16, box 3, folder 28.
111. Meeting of the Executive Committee, 2 June 1939, AAPSW, MSS.378, 6/1.
112. Mildred Lamb, Edinburgh Child Guidance Clinic, to Association of Psychiatric Social Workers, 26 May 1939, AAPSW, MSS.378, 8/2.
113. Marion Whyte, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, to Miss K. Finlow, APSW Policy Sub-Committee, citing MacCalman, 17 June 1939, AAPSW, MSS.378, 8/2.
114. Gertrude Keir, "Symposium on Psychologists and Psychiatrists in the Child Guidance Service: III A History of Child Guidance," Brit. J. Educ. Psychol., 1952, 22 (1): 5-29, on p. 25.
115. Catherine M. McCallum, "Symposium on Psychologists and Psychiatrists in the Child Guidance Service: IV Child Guidance in Scotland," Brit. J. Educ. Psychol., 1952, 22 (2): 79-88, on p. 79.
116. Brit. J. Educ. Psychol. Ibid.
117. Brit. J. Educ. Psychol.Ibid., p. 80 (emphasis in original).
118. See also Abrams, Orphan Country (n. 4), p. 169.
119. On McCallum's appointments, see Minutes of the Sub-Committee on Teachers and Training, 29 May 1939, Minutes of Glasgow Corporation, C1/3/100, Mitchell Library.
120. See also Geoffrey A. Dell, "Thirty Years of Child Guidance: The Development of the Glasgow Child Guidance Service," Scot. Educ. Stud., 1969, 1 (3): 32-40, on pp. 32, 34.
121. Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind (n. 4), pp. 74, 161.
122. "Report on Session 1935-36," Notre Dame Minute Book, GUABRC, UGC 58/1/2/1.
123. Child Guidance Council, Report of the Inter-Clinic Conference 1935 (London: Child Guidance Council, 1935), p. 1.
124. Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind (n. 4), p. 92.
125. Child Guidance Council, Report (n. 98), p. 50.
126. Lindsay Paterson, Scottish Education in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), p. 48.
127. On Boyd's influence, see also Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind (n. 4), p. 161.
128. William Boyd, ed., Towards a New Education: A Record and Synthesis of the Discussions on the New Psychology and the Curriculum at the Fifth World Conference of the New Education Fellowship Held at Elsinore, Denmark, in August 1929 (London: Knopf, 1930), p. 290.
129. Towards A New Education: A Record and Synthesis of the Discussions on the New Psychology and the Curriculum at the Fifth World Conference of the New Education Fellowship Held at Elsinore, Denmark, in August 1929 Ibid.
130. Towards A New Education: A Record and Synthesis of the Discussions on the New Psychology and the Curriculum at the Fifth World Conference of the New Education Fellowship Held at Elsinore, Denmark, in August 1929 Ibid.
131. "Typescript autobiography of William Boyd," p. 388, GUABRC, DC 130/1/1.
132. Typescript Autobiography of William Boyd, Ibid., p. 249.
133. Typescript Autobiography of William Boyd, Ibid., p. 342.
134. Judith Sealander, Private Wealth and Public Life: Foundation Philanthropy and the Reshaping of American Social Policy from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 80.
135. See also correspondence between Memorial and English educationalists, October 1929, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, ser. 3, box 32, folder 339, RAC.
136. Douglas R. MacCalman, "The General Management of Maladjustment in Children," in A Survey of Child Psychiatry, ed. Ronald G. Gordon (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 257-68, on p. 259.
137. Douglas R. MacCalman, "The Present Status and Functions of the Child Guidance Movement in Great Britain, and Its Possible Future Developments," J. Ment. Sci., 1939, 85: 505-21, on p. 511 (emphasis in original).
138. J. Ment. Sci., Ibid.
139. Doris Robinson, Secretary, London Child Guidance Clinic, to Scoville, 17 April 1934, citing the opinion of Dr. Moodie, Medical Director of the London Child Guidance Clinic, CFA 16, box 3, folder 28.
140. "Annual General Meeting of the Child Guidance Council," 21 January 1935, CFA 16, box 7, folder 74.
141. Sealander, "History of Childhood Policy" (n. 2), p. 179.