Historicizing health and education: Investigations of the eyesight of school children in the early nineteenth century

The purpose of this paper is to examine the historical roots of the modern relationship between health and education. The author draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem to make the case that the transformation of medical knowledge in the early nineteenth century created new ways knowing that was the foundation of a modern relationship between health and education.

Using the archives of ophthalmology, the author demonstrates how new medical knowledge and scientific methods were the basis of investigations of the eyesight of school children in the early nineteenth century. These investigations reflected the nineteenth century scientific ethos that placed a premium on techniques such as counting, measuring, statistical reasoning, and empirical observation to form the grounds of legitimacy of an autonomous “objective” knowledge. The modern relationship between health and education was an instance of a generalized medico-scientific interest in the health of populations that utilized the methods of empirical positivist science whose speculative interest was aimed at defining the normal.

Scientific investigations of the eyesight of school children in the early nineteenth century contributed to the formation of an anatomo-politics of the body and a biopolitics of population through a “medical mathematics” that defined a relation between eyesight, health and education.

This study illustrates how sources such as the archives of ophthalmology can broaden and deepen our understanding of the relation between health and education.