Since the origins of mankind, hygiene and education have been linked. However, the emergence of the hygienist movement in the mid-nineteenth century, the social transformations and educational changes related to the schooling process that took place in that century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the scientific study of infancy all encouraged the rise of associations, the creation of new professions, the holding of congresses, the proliferation of publications and the enactment of legal provisions. Covering the last decades of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, this paper provides a brief historical review of the complex process of convergence between hygiene and education, the influences and repercussions that the reception of international hygienist trends had on the school setting, its impulses and resistances, its signs and the breadth of its applications. Attention is focused mainly on some of its most noteworthy repercussions, such as the buildings and spaces dedicated to schools, the distribution of school time, the teaching of hygiene in teacher training and primary education, and the creation and encouragement of certain initiatives in non formal education. The extent to which the intensification of the link between hygiene and education influenced the modernization process of the Spanish educational system is shown.