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  • Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War
  • Beth Linker
Jeffrey S. Reznick . Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War. Cultural History of Modern War. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2004. xii + 172 pp. Ill. $69.95 (ISBN-10: 0-7190-6974-2; ISBN-13: 978-0-71906-974-1).

Healing the Nation proves that caregiving is more than mere medicine. Focusing on how Britain recovered its wounded during World War I, Jeffrey Reznick demonstrates that the process of physical and psychic healing occurred on a multitude of institutional levels, required a wide array of professional and nonprofessional personnel, and drew upon Victorian views about manhood as well as medical theories about the curative value of rest.

Reznick organizes his narrative of wartime caregiving along the "lines of communication," a common phrase used to describe a soldier's journey back home—in this case, from "battlefield to Blighty." The rest hut was the first stop for many "weary" soldiers, since it was situated immediately behind the front lines. Run by volunteer organizations such as the Salvation Army and the YMCA, these huts encouraged "broken-down" soldiers to sip hot (nonalcoholic) drinks, play card games, get lost in conversation, and, most importantly, interact with female volunteers who were responsible for making the huts a homey place.

If, however, a soldier sustained a so-called Blighty wound, he was sent back to England to a military hospital, where, as Reznick shows, he was disciplined and supervised in a manner reminiscent of Erving Goffman's total institution. Relying on patient-produced hospital magazines as his primary source material, Reznick argues that although hospital authorities touted complete bed rest, soldiers experienced little quietude. The constant gramophonic music grated on their nerves, just as the parade of visitors—mostly "gawking" society women—created feelings of irritation more than consolation. Reznick deftly employs material culture history when he looks at the "convalescent blues"—clothing issued to every soldier patient—and shows how the pocketless, ill-fitted jumper assaulted the soldiers' feelings of masculinity and autonomy (only women, who carried purses, wore clothing without pockets).

The last stop along the caregiving line of communication was the "curative workshop," a medical clinic-turned-factory. Here, orthopedic surgeons treated and taught the permanently disabled how to reenter the workplace to become wage earners again. This line of medical work, known as "after-care" (or what we would call today physical and vocational rehabilitation), remade the image of the "hospital as a factory and identified soldier patients in this environment as able-bodied and efficient workers" (p. 122).

Although Reznick targets scholars interested in war studies as his primary audience (see pp. 8–12), his book has much to offer medical historians. At times, Healing the Nation reads like Sheila Rothman's Living in the Shadow of Death—at least the last quarter of the book, where she discusses life in the early twentieth-century tuberculosis sanatorium. The patients in both Reznick's and Rothman's accounts convey a true disdain for prolonged bed rest, expressing feelings of "restlessness" and profound boredom. Reznick's book invites compelling comparisons between [End Page 880] sanatorium and military hospital life and demonstrates that a thorough history of the predominance and multiple uses of the rest cure during the early twentieth century remains to be written.

Healing the Nation is also a welcome addition to the history of medicine because it focuses on a little-studied group of physicians and progressive reformers who championed after-care as a form of therapeutics for the chronically ill and "deformed." This facet of medical history is particularly important today because it intersects in meaningful ways with the new disability history, war studies, gender studies, and welfare studies. As Reznick demonstrates, medical professionals interested in after-care had little to do with germs and even less to do with actual surgery (despite the fact that many of its practitioners were orthopedic surgeons). Instead, they spoke in terms of rehabilitation, refashioned their clinics to look like machine shops, and focused on disability rather than disease.

Beth Linker
University of Pennsylvania

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