War, Medicine and Modernity

This is an assessment of the crucial inteconnections between war, medicine and "modernity". Covering the period from 1870 to 1945, beginning with the Franco-Prussian War and ending with World War II, it spans not only the birth of modern warfare but also one of the most critical periods in the emergence of modern society. Using perspectives from medical history, particularly on the body, disease concepts, the relationship between knowledge and organization and the ideology of management, contributors here demonstrate the importance of the interaction between war and medicine in the development of the modern world. War is not treated as an extraordinary episode distinct from civil life, but as an integral aspect of the making of social modernity. This volume highlights the practice of medicine as a crucial element in the social changes brought about by the conduct of modern warfare. The essays reveal how concepts and practices in military medicine both reflect and influence the prevailing concerns of civilian medicine.

Edited by three scholars of the history of medicine, War, Medicine & Modernity offers a chronological and thematic survey of the place of medicine in modern warfare and society. From the role of the civilian Red Cross in the Franco-Prussian war to the disciplining of fear in the Second World War, and from the study of plague in Cape Town during the Anglo-Boer War to the use of chemical warfare in World War I, the diverse essays collected here introduce key topics in the study of war in the modern period. In their useful introduction, Cooter and Sturdy explore the very idea of the modern and put Max Weber's analysis of the bureaucratization of social life at the center of their account of the experience of war and medicine since 1870: we need to understand, the authors suggest, "the reciprocal processes of the civilianization of medicine in war and its militarization during peacetime." That double focus--the state regimentation of health, medicine as a bureaucratic and humanitarian exercise of control--is sustained through this collection, in part to put history and sociology back into recent discussions of war and modernity. At times the editors seem irritable with, even dismissive of, some of those discussions (in particular, the literary and cultural approaches to modernism and the experience of shellshock); nevertheless, this is a collection that should start to broaden the scope of that ongoing discussion. --Vicky Lebeau, Amazon.co.uk