Abstract
Almost everyone who wrote on British medicine in the wake of the Second World War regarded ‘the creation of a framework for a national rehabilitation scheme ... one of the chief successes of the Government’s emergency medical service’.1 Richard Titmuss, in his official history of the wartime civilian services, was cautious about the comprehensiveness and uniformity of the rehabilitation services by 1945,2 but his estimation of their overall value was fully in accord with that of Bevin, Beveridge and many other war and postwar politicians and planners. Indeed, his estimate echoed that of the first postwar Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, who proclaimed that ‘One of the best things that has come out of the war is the development of the Rehabilitation services.’3
For the orthopaedic services the [Second World] war marked a new beginning. (Richard Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, 1950, p. 476.)
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Notes
Richard Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Civil Service), ed. W.K. Hancock (1950), p. 480.
Bevan, Foreword to The Road to Health — The Story of Medical Rehabilitation (Ministry of Health, 1947), p. 2. See also Ann Carr, ‘Rehabilitation and Resettlement’ in Health and Social Welfare 1945–1946 (1947), pp. 43–8.
See Stephen J. Watkins, ‘Occupational Health Services — Part of the Health Care System?’, MSc thesis, University of Manchester, 1982;
C.N. Moss, ‘Rehabilitation and Occupational Medicine’, J. Occupat. Med., 16 (1974), pp. 81–5; and
T.A. Lloyd Davies, ‘Whither Occupational Medicine’, Proc. Roy. Soc. Med., 66 (1973), pp. 818–21. For America, see
Edward D. Berkowitz, ‘The Federal Government and the Emergence of Rehabilitation Medicine’, The Historian, 43 (1981), pp. 530–45.
(G. Tomlinson), Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on the Rehabilitation and Resettlement of Disabled Persons, 1942–3. Cmd 6415.
H. Osmond-Clarke and J. Crawford Adams, ‘Orthopaedic Surgery: general review’, in Zachary Cope (ed.), Surgery (History of the Second World War) (1953), pp. 234–70, at p. 234.
Osmond-Clarke and Adams, ‘Orthopaedic Surgery’ p. 237. See also John B. Coates and M. Cleveland (eds), Orthopaedic Surgery in the European Theater of Operations (Washington, DC, 1956).
See Jim Fyrth, The Signal Was Spain (1986), pp. 148ff; “‘Trueta’s Message” ‘ in J. Trueta, Surgeon in War and Peace (1980), pp. 265–79; and ‘Minor Injuries in Civil Bombardment — Dr Trueta’s Address’, BMJ, 16 Dec. 1939, pp. 1197–9. However, Trueta’s major therapeutic contribution — his closed plaster treatment of wounds — was no sooner taken up by orthopaedists than it was forced to be abandoned (or radically modified) as a result of changes in the tactical circumstances of the war, and by the introduction of sulphonamides and, later, penicillin. See J. C. Scott, ‘Closed Plaster Treatment of Wounds’, in Cope, Surgery, pp. 280–7;
William Heneage Ogilvie, ‘The Surgery Of War Wounds: a forecast (1940) and a retrospect (1945)’ in his Surgery: orthodox and heterodox (1948), pp. 204–11; Osmond-Clarke and Adams, ‘Orthopaedic Surgery’, pp. 237–43; and Army Medical Department Bulletin, Suppl. No.22, May 1945, section ‘Wound Treatment Before 1943’.
J. A. MacFarlane, ‘Wounds in Modern War’, JBJS, 24 (1942), pp. 739–52 at p. 739.
Rowley Bristow, ‘Some Surgical Lessons of the War’, JBJS, 25 (1943), pp. 524–34 at p. 524.
See Neville M. Goodman, Wilson Jameson: architect of national health (1970), p. 112; ‘Nuffield Hospital Trust: papers of Sir William Jameson, CMO, Ministry of Health’, PRO:MH/77/24;
J. V. Pickstone, Medicine and Industrial Society (Manchester, 1985), p. 312; and
Daniel Fox, Health Policies, Health Politics (Princeton, 1986), p. 97.
Robert Stanton Woods, ‘Physical Medicine’ in C.L. Dunn (ed.), The Emergency Medical Services (History of the Second World War) (1952), pp. 366–87 at p. 366. See also ‘Physical Medicine’ in Ministry of Health, National Health Service: the development of consultant services (1950), pp. 15–16;
Francis Bach, Recent Advances in Physical Medicine (1950); and ‘History of the Archives — a journal of ideas and ideals’, Arch. Phys. Med. and Rehab., 50 (1969), pp. 6–42. Woods (1877–1954) was physician to the London Hospital in charge of the Physical Medicine department there from 1911; president of the RSM section on Physical Medicine from 1932; president of the International Congress on Physical Medicine in 1936 and from 1936 to 1946 consultant adviser to the Ministry of Health. See obituary in BMJ, 27 Nov. 1954, pp. 1295–6, 1362.
See Gerald Larkin, Occupational Monopoly and Modern Medicine (1983), ch. 4: ‘Physiotherapy’; and, for the American experience,
Glenn Gritzer and Arnold Arluke, The Making of Rehabilitation (Berkeley, 1985), ch 5: ‘The Rediscovery of Rehabilitation, 1941–1950’.
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© 1993 Roger Cooter
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Cooter, R. (1993). The Phoney War. In: Surgery and Society in Peace and War. Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10235-5_11
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