Facing Illness in Troubled Times. Health in Europe in the Interwar years 1918–1939

Abstract

In the autumn of 1918, the end of the deadliest war in history coincided with the beginning of the deadliest epidemic yet in human history. For the countries of Europe these two events brought novel problems of reconstruction, and an urgency towards modernisation that was unprecedented. Social dislocation and demographic trauma, and new geographies and political systems, drove efforts to rebuild families, communities and nations with stronger physical and psychological identities. As Iris Borowy and Wolf Gruner argue in their admirable introduction to this volume of essays, ‘[h]ealth both reflected and played a crucial role in the evolvement of the political and social order of interwar Europe’ (p. 1). The extent to which health grew to be viewed as a public issue is, they suggest, one of the most striking features of this period and new scientific techniques in bacteriology, nutrition science and statistical methodology were co-opted in the effort to study and improve health.

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