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Student Bodies: The Influence of Student Health Services in American Society and Medicine By Heather Munro Prescott (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007) (234 pages, $50.00 cloth)
In an era when more and more adult children are moving back home to live with their parents, historian Heather Munro Prescott's book offers important insights into how the very definition of adolescence - especially from the medical perspective - hinges more on the social and cultural than on the biological. It used to be that "adolescent" was just another term for "teenager." Today, however, certain medical experts argue that thirty-yearolds are adolescents, too. Pushing the age limit upward is a reflection of the fact "that the period of semidependency usually associated with adolescence has been extended because of longer periods of education, preparation for careers, and/or economic dependence on parents" (p. 3). This may sound like a medically imprecise way to define a category of patients, but college health, as Prescott deftly shows us, has always been as much about molding and shaping behavior as it has been about treating disease.
The first third of Student Bodies is dedicated to the history of physical education, a story that spans the mid-nineteenth century to 1920, when the physicians who...