Contagious Communities: Medicine, Migration and the NHS in Post-War Britain. By Roberta Bivins

Abstract

Recent media coverage of Max Moseley’s involvement in the 1961 by-election in Moss Side reveals the ways in which alarmist and overtly racist campaigns were directed towards non-White migrants in postwar Britain. Leaflets that were allegedly circulated at the time proclaimed, ‘Protect your health. There is no medical check on immigration. Tuberculosis, VD and other terrible diseases like leprosy are on the increase. Coloured immigration threatens your children’s health.’ This was certainly not the only time that public health served as a catalyst for public opinion. In 1962, for example, Pakistani migrants were required to wear vaccination badges following a smallpox outbreak, thus demonstrating the ways in which pseudo-scientific myths characterized postwar attitudes towards ‘the coloured invasion’. What is clear from these campaigns, as observed by Roberta Bivins, is that perceptions of foreign bodies have shaped both medical knowledge and immigration policies. Indeed, it is along these lines that Bivins, in the lucid and captivating Contagious Communities, uses a fascinating medicalized lens to understand the impact of postwar migration to Britain.