Higiene mental y educación terapéutica: la pedagogía ortofrénica en la España del primer tercio del siglo XX

Abstract

The development of the so-called «feeble-minded childhood» was one of the immediate consequences of obligatory education. The fact that some child had difficulties in accepting educational rules or getting adapted to them lead to their medicalization and to set off an assistive technology that, under different titles like medico-pedagogy, therapeutic education, orthophrenic pedagogy, delineated a field of action shared by physicians and pedagogues. The paper will analyze the importance and success of this orthophrenic pedagogy within the framework of the Spanish science, society and culture during the first decades of the XXth century. Authors will draw special attention not only to discourses held by experts in order to justify their intervention but also to professional interests and scientific practices carried out by them.