The New Health Society, founded by Sir William Arbuthnot Lane in 1925, aimed to convert a `rapidly degenerating community' into a `nation composed of healthy, vigorous members'. An analysis of this society, which combined social Darwinist and eugenicist rhetoric with utopian body practices and progressive gender ideology, deepens our understanding of interwar public health debates. The Society saw the bowels as central to health and considered constipation the root cause of many ills of civilisation. Its critique of civilisation, framed in terms of a valorisation of `native' culture, nevertheless embraced modern science, technology and mass media. The Society was not hereditarian and saw health education as the key to race regeneration. Health and happiness were within the reach of all whose hygienic regimen included a high-fibre diet, outdoor exercise and sun-bathing, along with birth control and men's dress reform. Despite its idiosyncrasy, the Society's understanding of health as a personal responsibility and duty of citizenship, which sidestepped the question of poverty and inequality, resembled the views of Sir George Newman, the Chief Medical Officer. This article discusses the New Health Society's ideology, focusing on politics, race and gender, and locates the Society within the wider context of official health education campaigns in interwar Britain.
...MoreDescription “An analysis of this society, which combined social Darwinist and eugenicist rhetoric with utopian body practices and progressive gender ideology, deepens our understanding of interwar public health debates.” (from the abstract)
Article
Cassia Roth;
(2020)
The Degenerating Sex: Female Sterilisation, Medical Authority and Racial Purity in Catholic Brazil
(/isis/citation/CBB353485138/)
Book
Healey, Dan;
(2009)
Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917--1939
(/isis/citation/CBB001034256/)
Article
Melling, Joseph;
Dale, Pamela;
(2009)
Medical Officers of Health, Gender and Government Responses to the Problem of Cancer in Britain, 1900--1940
(/isis/citation/CBB000954558/)
Chapter
Morris, Sharon;
(2006)
“Human Dregs at the Bottom of Our National Vats”: The Inter-War Debate on Sterilization of the Mentally Deficient
(/isis/citation/CBB000774649/)
Article
Baker, Graham;
(2014)
Eugenics and Migration: A Case Study of Salvation Army Literature about Canada and Britain, c.1890--1921
(/isis/citation/CBB001420269/)
Article
Waddington, Keir;
(2001)
The Science of Cows: Tuberculosis, Research and the State in the United Kingdom, 1890-1914
(/isis/citation/CBB000102228/)
Book
Erika Dyck;
Maureen Lux;
(2020)
Challenging Choices: Canada's Population Control in the 1970s
(/isis/citation/CBB928803182/)
Article
Jennifer Fraser;
(2021)
Seizing the Means of Reproduction? Canada, Cancer Screening, and the Colonial History of the Cytopipette
(/isis/citation/CBB836159819/)
Article
Agata Ignaciuk;
Christabelle Sethna;
(2020)
Charters for Choice: Abortion Travel, Abortion Referral Networks and Spanish Women's Transnational Reproductive Agency, 1975–1985
(/isis/citation/CBB671788250/)
Essay Review
Gallagher, Nancy;
(2012)
Medicine and Modernity in the Middle East and North Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB001566255/)
Book
Brier, Jennifer;
(2009)
Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis
(/isis/citation/CBB001200310/)
Article
O'Connor, Eileen;
(2008)
Constructing Medical Social Authority on Dress in Victorian Canada
(/isis/citation/CBB000933091/)
Book
Federico Edoardo Perozziello;
(2022)
Il Male in medicina. Scienza, nazismo, eugenetica
(/isis/citation/CBB786277368/)
Thesis
Halfmann, Drew T.;
(2001)
Interests in Contexts and Institutional Democracy: The Politics of Abortion Policy in Liberal Welfare States, 1950--2000
(/isis/citation/CBB001562377/)
Book
Abugideiri, Hibba;
(2010)
Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt
(/isis/citation/CBB001250215/)
Article
Flannery, Michael A.;
(2015)
Alfred Russel Wallace's Medical Libertarianism: State Medicine, Human Progress, and Evolutionary Purpose
(/isis/citation/CBB001550601/)
Book
C. Elizabeth Koester;
(2021)
In the Public Good: Eugenics and Law in Ontario
(/isis/citation/CBB455004372/)
Article
Alter, Joseph S.;
(2007)
Yoga and Physical Education: Swami Kuvalayananda's Nationalist Project
(/isis/citation/CBB000850166/)
Article
Burek Pierce, Jennifer;
(2008)
Science, Advocacy, and “The Sacred and Intimate Things of Life”: Representing Motherhood as a Progressive Era Cause in Women's Magazines
(/isis/citation/CBB001032399/)
Chapter
De Vries, Petra;
(2001)
“The shadow of contagion”: Gender, syphilis and the regulation of prostitution in the Netherlands, 1870-1914
(/isis/citation/CBB000102665/)
Be the first to comment!