The scientific claims of British child guidance, 191845

British Journal for the History of Science

Volumn 42, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 407-432

  Stewart, John ^a,b  

^a GLASGOW CALEDONIAN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

^b Glasgow Caledonian University   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CHILD; CHILD PSYCHIATRY; COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH CENTER; HISTORY; HUMAN; MENTAL HEALTH; PRESCHOOL CHILD; UNITED KINGDOM;

CHILD; CHILD GUIDANCE; CHILD PSYCHIATRY; CHILD, PRESCHOOL; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; MENTAL HEALTH;

EID: 74949144397     PISSN: 00070874     EISSN: 1474001X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087408001908     Document Type: Review

References (146)

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9. A. Scull, 'Psychiatry and social control in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries', History of Psychiatry (1991), 2, 149-69, 164-5.
10. Hendrick, op. cit. (6), 28-30.
11. The National Archives (hereafter TNA), ED 50/48, Child Guidance Council, 'Report of the subcommittee appointed to consider the details of the proposed Demonstration Clinic, and to report to the Council on March 25th, 1927'.
12. University of Manchester, the John Rylands University Library (hereafter Rylands), Store (Med.Pam.2)/ 87.28i, W. Moodie, The London Child Guidance Clinic: A Survey, London, n.d. but 1935 or 1936, Foreword.
13. J. Bowlby, 'The influence of early environment in the development of neurosis and neurotic character', International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1940), 21, 154-78, 155.
14. E. Miller, The Future of Child Guidance in Relation to War Experience, London, 1941, 20, 21.
15. For Miller's importance to forensic psychiatry, based on his child guidance work and its relationship with juvenile offenders, see H. R. Rollin, 'Forensic psychiatry in England: a retrospective', in 150 Years of British Psychiatry, Volume II: The Aftermath (ed. H. Freeman and G. E. Berrios), London, 1996, 263-4.
16. The Health of the School Child: Report of the Chief Medical Officer of the Ministry of Education for the Years 1939-1945, London, 1947, 63.
17. C. L. C. Burns, 'Child guidance on the Continent', British Journal of Educational Psychology (1933), 3, 251-67.
18. British child guidance has received little detailed historical attention, partial exceptions being D. Thom, 'Wishes, anxiety, play, and gestures: child guidance in inter-war England', in In the Name of the Child: Health and Welfare, 1880-1940 (ed. R. Cooter), London, 1992, 200-19;
19. J. Stewart, 'Child guidance in interwar Scotland: international influences and domestic concerns', Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2006), 80, 513-39;
20. idem, 'An "enigma to their parents": the founding and aims of the Notre Dame Child Guidance Clinic, Glasgow', Innes Review (2006), 57, 54-76.
21. See also H. Hendrick, Child Welfare: Historical Dimensions, Contemporary Debate, Bristol, 2003;
22. N. Rose, The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England, 1869-1939, London, 1985;
23. A. Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c.1860-c.1990, Cambridge, 1994;
24. L. Abrams, The Orphan Country: Children of Scotland's Broken Homes from 1845 to the Present Day, Edinburgh, 1998;
25. M. Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain, Oxford, 2006.
26. E. S. Rosenberg, 'Missions to the world: philanthropy abroad,' in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History (ed. L. J. Friedman and M. D. McGarvie), Cambridge, 2003, 241-58.
27. A. B. Smuts, Science in the Service of Children, 1893-1935, New Haven, 2005.
28. On American child guidance see K. W. Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority, Cambridge, MA, 1999;
29. M. Horn, Before It's Too Late: The Child Guidance Movement in the United States, 1922-1945, Philadelphia, 1989;
30. T. R. Richardson, The Century of the Child: The Mental Hygiene Movement and Social Policy in the United States and Canada, Albany, 1989.
31. On the Commonwealth Fund see A. M. Harvey and S. L. Abrams, 'For the Welfare of Mankind': The Commonwealth Fund and American Medicine, Baltimore, 1986.
32. J. Grant, 'The Rockefeller philanthropies and the science of child development, 1918-1940', in Philanthropic Foundations: New Scholarship, New Possibilities (ed. E. C. Lageman), Bloomington, IN, 1999, 131-50.
33. D. C. Hammack, 'Failure and resilience: pushing the limits in depression and wartime', in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History (ed. L. J. Friedman and M. D. McGarvie), Cambridge, 2003, 263-80, 274.
34. E. Macadam, The New Philanthropy, London, 1934, 223.
35. For a similar trend in the United States see J. Sealander, 'Curing evils at their source: the arrival of scientific giving', in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History (ed. L. J. Friedman and M. D. McGarvie), Cambridge, 2003, 217-39.
36. Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, New York, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Series 3, Box 46, Folder 491, n.d. but 1920s, publicity material (emphasis in the original).
37. L. Jordanova, 'The social construction of medical knowledge', Social History of Medicine (2005), 8, 361-81, 376.
38. On the popularization of science through printed media see P. J. Bowler, 'Experts and publishers: writing popular science in early twentieth-century Britain, writing popular history of science now', BJHS (2006), 39, 159-87.
39. Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, New York, Commonwealth Fund Archives (hereafter CF), Series 16, English Mental Hygiene Program (hereafter Series 16).
40. M. Thomson, 'Mental hygiene as an international movement', in International Health Organisations and Movements (ed. P. Weindling), Cambridge, 1995, 283-304.
41. For a contemporary account see The Voluntary Mental Health Services: The Report of the Feversham Committee, London, 1939.
42. The National Council for Mental Hygiene, The Eighth Report of the National Council for Mental Hygiene, London, 1931, 3.
43. TNA, ED 50/273, notes prepared by Board of Education for a speech to be made by Mr Shakespeare to the Child Guidance Inter-Clinic conference, 29 to 30 January 1937.
44. N. H. M. Burke and E. Miller, 'Child mental hygiene - its history, methods and problems', British Journal of Medical Psychology (1929), 9, 218-42, 218, 222.
45. Macadam, op. cit. (22), 124.
46. CF, Series 7, Box 7, Folders 51-3, data extracted from Reports of the Board of Directors for relevant years.
47. Thomson, op. cit. (17), 61.
48. B. Hart, 'Work of a child guidance clinic', British Medical Journal (1931), 2, 528-30, 528.
49. H. V. Dicks, Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic, London, 1970, 3.
50. Hendrick, op. cit. (17), 4-5 and passim.
51. R. Porter, 'Two cheers for psychiatry! The social history of mental disorder in twentieth-century Britain', in 150 Years of British Psychiatry, Volume II: The Aftermath (ed. H. Freeman and G. E. Berrios), London, 1996, 383-406, 392, 397.
52. D. Armstrong, 'The rise of surveillance medicine', Sociology of Health and Illness (1995), 17, 393-404, 395, 396.
53. J. Drever and M. Drummond, The Psychology of the Pre-school Child, London, 1929, 174.
54. D. R. MacCalman, 'The management of the difficult child', Journal of the Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene (1937), 1, 93-6, 93.
55. London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), E/NOR/Y/12, copy of Journal of the London Society, no. 208, June 1935, article 'Canonbury Tower and the London Child Guidance Clinic', 93-6, 95.
56. Liverpool Local Record Office (hereafter LRO), HQ360.5 QUA, Dr M. B. Hall, 'Mental hygiene in Liverpool', Liverpool Quarterly (1933), 1, 6, 9-10.
57. D. K. Henderson, 'Social psychiatry: being the Morison Lectures for 1931 at the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh - second lecture', Edinburgh Medical Journal (1931), 38, 359-78, 367.
58. E. Miller, 'The difficult child: a medical, psychological and sociological problem', Mother and Child (1930), 1, 162-7, 162.
59. The Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the Commonwealth Fund, New York, 1943, 18.
60. R. G. Gordon, 'Address to mothers: the dangerous age of childhood', Mother and Child (1938), 9, 80-5, 84. Concerns with modernity and maladjustment were not confined to child guidance.
61. See C. Lawrence, 'Still incommunicable: clinical holists and medical knowledge in interwar Britain', in Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920-1950 (ed. C. Lawrence and G. Weisz), Oxford, 1998, 94-111.
62. University of Liverpool, Archives and Special Collections (hereafter UofL), E X 65:39, The Liverpool Child Guidance Council, Report for the Year 1939, Liverpool, 1940?, 11.
63. Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the Commonwealth Fund, op. cit. (44), 16.
64. Thomson op. cit. (17), 116.
65. On the historiography and significance of evacuation see J. Stewart and J. Welshman, 'The evacuation of children in wartime Scotland: culture, behaviour and poverty', Journal of Scottish Historical Studies (2006), 26, 100-20.
66. The Scottish Women's Group on Public Welfare, Our Scottish Towns: Evacuation and the Social Future, Edinburgh, 1944, 18.
67. National Archives of Scotland (hereafter NAS), ED7/1/52, Board of Education, 'Education after the War', 1941, 32.
68. NAS, ED 15/108, 'Scottish Advisory Council on the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Offenders: the treatment and rehabilitation of offenders: notes submitted by Professor D. K. Henderson, Department of Psychiatry, Edinburgh University: Paper No. 13', n.d. but 1945. I am grateful to Professor Roger Davidson, University of Edinburgh, for this reference.
69. For a brief account of how the Board of Education came to sanction expenditure see The Health of the School Child: Annual Report of the Chief Medical Officer of the Board of Education for the Year 1934, London, 1935, 114-16.
70. M. Collins and J. Drever, Psychology and Practical Life, London, 1936, 275.
71. W. M. Burbury, E. M. Balint and B. J. Yapp, An Introduction to Child Guidance, London, 1945, 2.
72. British Medical Journal (1928), 2, 675.
73. British Library of Political and Economic Science, Archives of the London School of Economics (hereafter BLPES), Central Filing Registry/514/2/C, 'Report on the Mental Health Course, 7th November 1938'.
74. The Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine (hereafter Wellcome Library), John Bowlby Papers, PP/BOW/C.3/7, Proposal to Medical Research Council, 16 February 1939.
75. Sturdy and Cooter, op. cit. (1), 433, 434, 423, 427.
76. Rylands, Store A 141639, P. Shapiro, How Child Guidance Contributes to Mental Health, London, 1933, 4.
77. CF, Series 31, Reports of the General Director, 'Report of the General Director to the Directors of the Commonwealth Fund, 21st April 1936', 17.
78. Mitchell Library, Glasgow, D-TC 7/7/13, Notre Dame Child Guidance Clinic: Annual Report, 1933-34, Glasgow, n.d. but 1934, 8-9 and passim.
79. LRO, H371.7 EDU, City of Liverpool Education Committee, Report on the Workof the School Medical Service for the Year 1937, Liverpool, n.d. but 1938, 46.
80. D. K. Henderson, 'Social psychiatry: being the Morison Lectures for 1931 at the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh - third lecture' Edinburgh Medical Journal (1931), 38, 414-38, 421.
81. British Medical Journal (1929), 2, 1219.
82. Stewart, 'Child guidance in interwar Scotland', op. cit. (17).
83. J. D. Pressman, 'Human understanding: psychosomatic medicine and the mission of the Rockefeller Foundation', in Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920-1950 (ed. C. Lawrence and G. Weisz), Oxford, 1998, 189-208, 193-4.
84. Library of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford. WX 28 FE5.2Lon/Guys, Report of the Institution and Development of the Child Guidance Clinic at Guy's Hospital, London, 1930-1936, n.p., n.d., 16.
85. Scull, op. cit. (9), 167.
86. A. Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c.1860-c.1990, Cambridge, 1994, 149. This is not to say that psychology did not have a wider impact.
87. See Thomson, op. cit. (17), Chapter 4 and passim.
88. Wooldridge, op. cit. (70), 161;
89. Stewart, 'Child guidance in interwar Scotland', op. cit. (17).
90. Child Guidance Council, Report of the Inter-clinic Conference 1935, London, 1935, 50-1.
91. TNA, ED 50/274, Board Memorandum M481/139, 'Child Guidance - General', n.d. but early 1940s.
92. Wooldridge, op. cit. (70), 92 and Chapter 4 passim.
93. C. Burt, The Young Delinquent, 4th edn, London, 1944, 649-51.
94. On psychology, expertise and selfhood see N. Rose, 'Engineering the human soul: analyzing psychological expertise', Science in Context (1992), 5, 351-69.
95. For a sense of what was involved see Oxfordshire Local Studies Centre, Central Library, Oxford. P OXFO/371.26, Scale Test for Estimating the Intelligence, as Used by the City of Oxford Educational (Child Guidance) Clinic, Oxford, 1935.
96. UofL, Papers of Sir Cyril Burt, D.191/20/1/9, Miss St. Clair Townsend, 'Report on Psychiatric Social Work', n.d. but late 1920s, 1;
97. and D.191/20/1/7, Ralph Crowley et al., '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, 5.
98. CF, Series 16, Box 2, Folder 14, letter, 20 December 1928, Barry Smith, Commonwealth Fund, to Child Guidance Council.
99. M. Collins and J. Drever, Psychology and Practical Life, London, 1936, 277-8.
100. Voluntary Mental Health Services, op. cit. (26), 154.
101. On psychiatric social workers see J. Stewart, '"I thought you would want to come and see his home": child guidance and psychiatric social work in inter-war Britain', in Health and the Modern Home (ed. M. Jackson), London, 2007, 111-27.
102. Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick (hereafter MRC), MSS.378/APSW/P/17/3, Association of Psychiatric Social Workers, 'Report prepared for the Feversham Committee on the Voluntary Mental Health Services', n.d. but late 1930s, 4.
103. MRC, MSS.378/APSW/P/12/20, LSE Exam Paper, 'Psychology and mental health of childhood and adolescence', June 1938.
104. Ministry of Health, Report of the Committee on Social Workers in the Mental Health Services: Cmd. 8260, London, 1951, 12.
105. M. D. L. Dickson, Child Guidance, London, 1938, 142-3.
106. MRC, MSS.378/APSW/P/2/2, Association of Psychiatric Social Workers, 'Report for the year 1936 (with foreword on years 1930-1935)', 5.
107. MRC, MSS.378/APSW/P/16/7, Association of Psychiatric Social Workers, 'News sheet VI: October 1936', 5.
108. Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, Chicago, 1931, 398.
109. Child Guidance Council, op. cit. (72), 38.
110. B. Robinson, 'The social approach to the problems of child guidance', Mother and Child (1933), 3, 353-5, 353.
111. Proceedings of the Child Guidance Inter-clinic Conference of Great Britain 1939, London, 1939, 98-9.
112. Rylands, Store (Med.Pam.2)/87.29, W. Moodie, Child Guidance by Team Work, London, 1931, 3.
113. R. G. Gordon, 'Foreword', in A Survey of Child Psychiatry (ed. R. G. Gordon), London, 1939.
114. BLPES, Central Filing Registry/514/1/A, letter, 31 January 1929, Child Guidance Council to the LSE; and letter, 3 June 1929, Child Guidance to the LSE.
115. BLPES, Minutes of School Committees/16/5 - Mental Health Course Academic Sub-Committee, Minutes of Meeting 18 May 1939.
116. R. Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880-1930, Cambridge, MA, 1965, 117.
117. Scull, op. cit. (9), 167.
118. Burbury, Balint and Yapp, op. cit. (55), 11, 14, 102.
119. B. Tomalin, 'Child guidance in relation to medical psychology', Mother and Child (1936), 7, 133.
120. S. B. Brown, 'The training of psychiatric social workers', Mental Hygiene (1939), 5, 136-9, 137.
121. 'Editorial: by way of introduction', Smith College Studies in Social Work (1930), 1, 1-5, 3.
122. Lawrence, op. cit. (45).
123. Voluntary Mental Health Services, op. cit. (26), 151.
124. Birmingham City Archives, BCC/BH 1/1/1/36, 'City of Birmingham Education Committee. Child Guidance Clinic. Report of the Medical Director, 1936-1938', 8.
125. C. L. C. Burns, 'Birmingham child guidance clinic: a review of two years' work', Mental Welfare (1935), 16, 1-7, 7.
126. Moodie, op. cit. (12), 7.
127. D. R. MacCalman, 'Foreword', in A. H. Bowley, The Natural Development of the Child, Edinburgh, 1947, 5-8, 5.
128. Wellcome Library, Papers of Robina Scott Addis, PP/ADD/C.3/1, Typescript 'Survey of the present position in regard to the work of the clinic', n.d. but mid-1930s.
129. Wellcome Library, Papers of Robina Scott Addis, PP/ADD/C.3/6, 'Mental health in childhood', summary of a speech given by E. A. Hamilton-Pearson, senior physician to the Children's Department of the Institute of Medical Psychology, April 1932.
130. C. Lawrence and G. Weisz, 'Medical holism: the context', in Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920-1950 (ed. C. Lawrence and G. Weisz), Oxford, 1998, 1-22, 7.
131. C. W. Valentine, The Difficult Child and the Problem of Discipline, London, 1940, 35-6.
132. LMA, 22.06 LCC, Report of the Special Services Sub-Committee of the Education Committee, 16th March 1936.
133. J. Rickman, 'Preface', in On the Bringing Up of Children (ed. J. Rickman), London, 1936, 7-14, 8, 9.
134. Rickman, op. cit. (113), 10.
135. L. Pyenson and S. Sheets-Pyenson, Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises, and Sensibilities, New York, 1999, 279.
136. For the impact on medical holists see Lawrence and Weisz, op. cit. (110), 6.
137. P. Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Times, London, 2006, 552.
138. For the response of Benjamin Spock, in part drawing on his child guidance experience, to the perceived problems of inter-war America, see W. Graebner, 'The unstable world of Benjamin Spock: social engineering in democratic culture, 1917-1950', Journal of American History (1980), 67, 612-29.
139. Rylands, Manchester Medical Collection, MMC 12/1/5, City of Manchester Education Committee: Annual Report of the School Medical Officer (Dr Henry Herd) 1932, Manchester, 1933, 32.
140. The Health of the School Child: Annual Report of the Chief Medical Officer of the Board of Education for the Year 1932, London, 1933, 37-8.
141. Lawrence and Weisz, op. cit. (110) 11, 13.
142. S. W. Tracy, 'An evolving science of man: the transformation and demise of American constitutional medicine, 1920-1950', in Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920-1950 (ed. C. Lawrence and G. Weisz), Oxford, 1998, 161-88, 170;
143. Lawrence and Weisz, op. cit. (110), 13;
144. R. Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences, London, 1997, 862;
145. S. J. Cross and W. R. Albury, 'Walter B. Cannon, L. J. Henderson, and the organic analogy', Osiris (1987), 2nd series, 3, 165-92, 166.
146. Cross and Albury, op. cit. (121), 189, 168.