It’s Time for Digital Health and Hygiene

Physical health and hygiene education in primary and secondary schools is taken as a given now, but it wasn’t always so. It was not until 1840 that Rhode Island legislation made health education mandatory.1 The 1850 publication by school teacher Lemuel Shattuck, of the Report of a General Plan for the Promotion of Public and Personal Health2 for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, caused American schools to receive both focus and funding to promote public health. This was to promote the prevention of disease. Shattuck’s report examined the current state of health across Europe and the sanitary conditions . . .