Body and Mind. Historical Essays in Honour of F.B. Smith by Graeme Davison

Abstract

126 Health & History, 20. 12/1 Book Reviews Graeme Davison, Pat Jalland, and Wilfrid Prest, eds, Body and Mind. Historical Essays in Honour of F.B. Smith (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-522-85687-3 (PB). ix + 243 pp. This collection of essays celebrates the achievements of F.B. (Barry) Smith, Australia’s leading historian of the social history of medicine. Colleagues and past students write on various aspects of health, mind, and medical professionalism in nineteenth– and twentieth– century Britain and Australia. Many engage with themes and issues Smith has investigated in the course of his many years of research and supervision of postgraduate students at the Australian National University. Wilf Prest introduces the book, briefly sketching Smith’s early life, education in various government and Catholic schools, and studies at the University of Melbourne in the early 1950s. He suggests how they contributed to the blend of scepticism and compassion for the victims of prejudice and power that has been the hallmark of Smith’s history making. Ken Inglis also reflects on Smith’s virtues as a colleague and legendary dedication to his numerous postgraduate students. Graeme Davison pays tribute to Smith’s long-standing interest in the connections between the inner life and public activism of nineteenth-century social reformers. He explores the spiritual and emotional turmoil of the young Manchester physician James Phillip Kay, destined to become a significant figure in mid-nineteenthcentury British liberal reformism. Through a sensitive reading of surviving correspondence relating to the middle-class Kay’s doomed love for Helen Kennedy—the daughter of one of Manchester’s wealthiest industrialists—Davison suggests how Kay’s failure in love and psychic ills shaped his understanding of the moral and physical condition of contemporary industrial society. Michael Roberts’ essay focuses on the politics of public health reform in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, taking issue with the engrained tendency to see Russell and Palmerston’s premierships as marked by government apathy in respect of public health. He convincingly argues for greater appreciation of the complexities and challengesofgovernancebymidcentury,andthatbothadministrations Health & History ● 12/1 ● 2010 127 sought to achieve health reform as best they could, allowing for the political realities they confronted. Alex Tyrrell offers an intriguing account of mid-nineteenthcentury British enthusiasts for hydropathy and their critics. He draws attention to how cold-water bathing cures were entangled in mysticism, dietary fads, and sexual adventure; but Tyrrell is concerned that hydropathy not be dismissed as the quackery its critics claimed it was. Rather, it should be seen as exemplifying how porous the boundaries between medical orthodoxy and innovation were in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, and moreover, how inseparable the causes of medical, social, and political reform often were in the early Victorian imagination. With Joanna Bourke’s essay we move into the twentieth century and enter the bleak world of men branded military and industrial malingerers. Like Smith, Bourke had sought to write medical history from the patient’s point of view, focusing in this instance on the individual experiences of those who sought to escape brutal and pointless death in battle, or evade the dangers inherent in unskilled industrial work. Also sharing Smith’s concern to document how medical professionals bent on strengthening their power and social influence exploited the plight of ordinary people, she draws unsettling yet persuasive connections between what men did to escape or subvert military or work-place discipline, and how psychologists fed on their desperation. Geoffrey Best is well known for his contributions to modern British and European history; but here he writes about growing up in outer suburban London in the 1930s, sensitive to how wider economic and social forces then shaped everyday experience. Pat Jalland’s essay on death in the Blitz follows, offering vivid insights into how everyday life for many Britons was brutally and forever shattered by the hell of aerial bombing between 1940–45. The last four essays in this collection will greatly interest historians of Australia and New Zealand. Philippa Mein Smith reflects on the aims and assumptions underpinning her influential work on patterns of interaction between settler societies in Australia and New Zealand. Janet McCalman reports on ongoing large-scale...