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Body and Mind
Body and Mind: Historical Essays in Honour of F. B. Smith

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Chapter Synopsis

  

Preliminary page

Containining cover page, table of content, list of contributor and introduction by Wilfrid Prest and Ken Inglis

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End of the book

Containing the list of PhD Students Supervised by F. B. Smith, F. B. Smith Bibliography and Index.

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1. Sociology and Self-Knowledge: James Phillips Kay and the Manchester Cotton Masters 1828:1835
Graeme Davison

In the early 1830s Manchester was a city in crisis, its industrial districts convulsed by disease, poverty, industrial and political unrest. James Phillips Kay, a 29-year-old physician, was promoting a new form of self-knowledge, social statistics, to diagnose its multiple ills. His pamphlet The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832) would become a landmark in the history of urban social enquiry. He had already taken the first steps of a career that would make him, as the future Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, a pillar of English liberal reform. Kay's Manchester years are significant not only in launching a brilliant career but in revealing the intellectual and emotional forces that drove him.

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2. Politics and Public Health in the Age of Lord Palmerston
M. J. D. Roberts

Lord Palmerston is not widely recognised as a sanitary reformer, rather the reverse. Two relatively well-known 'sanitary facts' have combined to ensure this. The first is the fact that it was under Palmerston's stewardship of the Home Office that the pioneer sanitary reformer, Edwin Chadwick, was driven from office by his opponents. The second is the fact that the period following Chadwick's dismissal was a period of considerable political frustration in moves to find a stable structure of public health administration in Britain The age of Palmerston saw the rise of the professionally qualified civil servant as compensation for the ignorance, lack of determination, and apathy of political elites. The assessment and management of public opinion by the Whigs and their allies of the Russell-Palmerston years were more seriously committed sanitary reformers than historians have usually been prepared to concede.

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3. A 'Cold Water Bubble'?
The Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Water-Cure and Its Adherents
Alex Tyrrell

Water cures became fashionable in Britain to the extent that in 1868 there were estimated to be approximately 50 hydropathic establishments in the British Isles, a number that rose to 79 in England, Wales and Scotland by 1888. Some of these establishments were so large and well appointed that they dominated their localities, notably Malvern which had about a dozen of them in 1888. Their impact on local business opportunities was often immense: people flocked in to service and experience the water cures; wealthy invalids retired there to be near their favourite hydropathic doctor; the building trades were stimulated; and ancillary services proliferated. The years between 1840 and 1870 were the heyday of the water cure. Hydropathy merits attention for it was no worse in its theoretical basis and practice than much contemporary medicine and it did enforce the lessons of cleanliness, fresh air, diet and exercise for a generation that was badly in need of them.

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4. The Malingerers' Craft: Mind Over Body in Twentieth-Century Britain and America
Joanna Bourke

Around seven per cent of all British men between the ages of fifteen and forty nine were killed in the Great War. For the others there was an ever present fear of gross mutilation. Medical understanding of war neuroses was contentious. A large proportion of medical officers insisted that men who broke down in wartime were actually malingering. Both the 'arts of malingering' and the 'science of detection' made rapid strides from 1914. From the late-nineteenth century the real concern about malingering could be found within civilian industrial contexts. How widespread was malingering? There was a dramatic growth in industrial accidents and in workers' compensation claims. Malingering in prisons was another site of anxiety and detection. Compensation claims for railway accidents increased from the mid nineteenth century. Military and industrial psychology gradually overtook policing and detection of malingerers towards emphasis on training of workers and soldiers. As the twentieth century progressed, the links between capitalist techniques of management moved closer, in a dynamic interplay between state and military, employers and employees, officers and privates.

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5. Education, Empire and Class: Growing Up in a New London Suburb in the 1930s
Geoffrey Best

Geoffrey Best reflects on growing up in suburban, Osterley, west of London, in the 1930s. The Bests were a middle class family in this 'middle classes' suburb in which the fine gradations of class were clear to all. Education was important to upwardly mobile middle class families who sent their children to fee paying schools to insulate them against acquiring working class manners and accents in 'council schools'. The better private schools called themselves preparatory schools, thus staking a claim to affinity with those socially superior 'prep schools', usually boarding schools. Best went to two local preparatory schools before attending St Paul's, unusually an undoubted public school and a day school. In Osterley, Best rarely encountered members of the working class, except as domestic servants, and the upper classes were remote figures, headed by the Royal family, venerated by Best's family. The British empire was a recurrent theme, made more real because of the Best's relatives in Australia and South Africa. Sporting clubs, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, local dramatic societies and church formed a network of social interaction for Best and his family. Politics began to intrude as the decade wore on, but was not central to Best's boyhood memories, despite the world being on the brink of war.

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6. The People's War: Death in the Blitz
Pat Jalland

The emotional culture relating to death and loss in Britain has changed greatly over the last hundred years, shaped powerfully by such forces as demography and religion, war and medicine, and memory and gender. There was a gradual shift from a dominant Christian culture of acceptance of death and more open expression of grief in the nineteenth century to one of avoidance and reticence in the half century after 1918. The focus of this essay is on the impact of the Second World War, more particularly the Blitz, on this process. The remarkable scale of civilian casualties in Britain in the Second World War was one of the major differences between the two world wars. The myth of the blitz was to conceal or reduce the actual devastation and death inflicted by refusing to dwell on the trauma of burnt bodies left after an air raid and the intense distress of wartime bereavement. To sustain morale, wartime censorship prohibited detailed reports on deaths and mass burials. The silences surrounding the dark side of the blitz affected commemoration as well as grieving. Since the late 1960s the changed emotional climate is expressed in open anger and resentment at the silencing of grief over civilian casualties in the blitz.

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7. Retracing Australasia: The History of a British Idea
Philippa Mein Smith

Philippa Mein Smith reflects on Barry's Smith's welcome to her as a new PhD student in history at the Australian National University, belonging to the 'real Australasia'; New South Wales, Victoria and New Zealand. Maps provide an excellent source for investigating the changing ideas of Australasia in the minds of Europeans. From a New Zealand and Australian perspective historians can fruitfully explore the histories of both countries adopting a framework of the Tasman world, which has persisted during the twentieth century. Ties of blood, body and soul bind together modern Australia and New Zealand. Shared British institutions, the Anzac legend, separate national destinies and movements of people between both countries complicate a complex trans-Tasman partnership between the two countries.

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8. To Die Without Friends: Solitaries, Drifters and Failures in a New World Society
Janet McCalman

They are to be found in the Victorian Pioneer Index in their tens of thousands: those who died 'without friends', in the presence of strangers who knew little or nothing of their birth place, their parents and their connections. Around a third of the 208,000 people who died aged 12 years or older between 1836 and 1888 in Victoria died with no one present knowing their father's name. Mothers' identities were a little more likely to be remembered. In the twentieth century to die without lineage was most commonly the fate of those who died within asylums or public hospitals. Settler colonies were not only sites of dispossession and destruction, they were also severe testing grounds for those who took possession and transplanted their culture and social forms into the second and third generations after emigration. The Melbourne Lying-In Hospital Birth Cohort Study, 1857-1985 reconstructs the life-course of those settlers born into poverty.

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9. The Private Life of Catherine Helen Spence, 1825-1910
Susan Magarey

Catherine Helen Spence was a public political person known for her advocacy of proportional representation as a voting system, being the first female political candidate in Australia, for her philanthropy and her novels. She made a place in the world of men and affairs of state, in the press, in the pulpit of the Unitarian Christian Church and on political platforms. She also had a private life. This essay considers the organization of Spence's household and domestic life, her relationships with her immediate family, her less immediate kin, her quasi-kin and her friendships. Despite her importance in forging a role for women in the public sphere, analysis of her domestic sphere as a world in itself, shaped by relationships of differentiated power, divisions of labour and financial responsibility, and by varying intensities of emotional bonding, housework, child-care and daily maintenance sheds additional light on a complex and energetic woman.

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10. '[A] Tangle of Decency and Folly, Courage and Chicanery, but Above All, Waste'.
The Case of Agent Orange and Australia's Vietnam Veterans
Peter Edwards

There is a strong case for a scholarly, book-length study of the Agent orange controversy in Australia, discussing the complex scientific and legal issues and placing them in their social and political context. This essay seeks only to comment on one part of the story, events of the 1980s and early 1990s, with particular reference to the section on 'Agent Orange: the Australian aftermath', contributed by F. B. Smith to the Official History of Australia's Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948-1975. As Official Historian and general editor of this multi-volume series, Edwards invited smith to research and write this section, succeeding to (probably to his regret in hindsight) in overcoming his reluctance to tackle a controversial, twentieth-century topic in which many of the protagonists were very much alive and vocal. It is timely to ask how Smith's section of the Official History stands, in the light of the report that 'overturned' the findings of the Evatt Royal Commission.

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