Regenerating England: Science, Medicine, and Culture in Inter-War Britain (review)

This collection of eleven excellent papers skillfully edited by Christopher Lawrence and Anna-K. Mayer offers even more than the sum of its admirable parts. It identifies and illuminates an important subelite level of cultural activity in England in the 1920s and 1930s that historians have hitherto largely ignored. In the process, it describes how scientists and medical doctors, like members of other professions in the interwar years who were trying to solve concrete problems, "continued to perceive it as part of their moral duty to publicize their social and moral insights" (p. 2). The eleven papers reveal that this tradition of "amateur" production of social thought about the nature of the regeneration or renewal of a lost England after the Great War was surprisingly rich and varied, rather than derivative from "a few great inter-war thinkers" (p. 16).

Historians of medicine and health will find each of the papers of interest. Setting out the historiographic context and themes of the book in the first chapter, the editors acknowledge the influence of Robert Colls and Philip Dodd's Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920 (1986), which stresses, as central to the period, the refashioning of "Englishness" to incorporate different elements in society. While this refashioning was clearly important to the stabilization of British life, the editors perhaps go too far in accepting its centrality at the expense of other key developments in the wake of World War I—such as the central government's ability to restore a high degree of consent to taxation by 1924, which Martin Daunton points to as a crucial contrast with other countries such as Germany. Although the subjects of the papers are diverse, the editors have selected them carefully and convincingly link them, both within their first chapter and by means of multiple cross-references within the collection.

Michael Bartholomew introduces the journalist and popular author H. V. Morton's vision of utopia, while Christopher Lawrence follows with what is destined to be an influential paper elucidating and placing the elite interwar English physicians' skepticism of the benefits of laboratory science in a wider cultural context. Anna-K. Mayer considers the views of scientists (e.g., Arthur Keith, Oliver Lodge, Sir William Bragg) and Englishness by focusing on an episode at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1927 when the Bishop of Ripon called for a ten-year moratorium on science. Timothy Boon vividly introduces the film-maker Paul Rotha's ideas about history, landscape, and progress as expressed in one of his films. Elizabeth Darling considers Elizabeth Denby's ideas about housing reform and the relationship of the built environment and social health. In an outstanding article Keith Vernon elucidates the ideas about the development of student life and health at civic universities which led to the provision of student facilities such as halls of residence. Abigail Beach considers the ideas of citizenship behind inner-city health centers and their ambivalent relationship with the medical profession; Mathew Thomson examines the interwar definitions of mental defectives or noncitizens; Rhodri Hayward presents the ideas of the anatomist Arthur Keith and the medical theories of the novelist and painter Morley Roberts; and, in a moving article, Lesley Hall considers the ideas of Stella Browne on women, health, and society.

In short, this is a model collection with individual papers that both make important contributions to their own areas, and together successfully increase our understanding of the complex medical and cultural history of the interwar years.