| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Empty Beds: Indian Student Health at Sherman Institute, 1902–1922. By Jean A. Keller. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002. xviii, 272 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-87013-633-X. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-87013-650-X.)

It is a commonly held notion that the federal off-reservation Indian boarding schools were deathtraps, places where native children were crowded together in an alien environment filled with disease and contamination while tended to, if at all, by an unqualified medical staff. While this characterization is undoubtedly true for some of the schools, Jean A. Keller makes a forceful argument that such was not the case at the last and most modern federal boarding school, the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, during its first two decades of operation. Indian education has been extensively studied in recent years, yet this is the first serious examination of strictly health-related issues. Keller focuses on how school superintendents dealt with the types of medical problems that plagued federal Indian schools, with chapters devoted to prevention, living facilities, doctors and nurses, epidemics and accidents, tuberculosis, and trachoma. The overall conclusion is that administrators were generally caring and conscientious, that they were as effective as they could be within the limits of federal policy, and that, on the basis of statistical reports, "student health at Sherman Institute fared very well" (p. 218).

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