Abstract
This paper reviews the historical evolution of the language and organization surrounding the health of personnel in the British Army from ‘hygiene’ through to ‘wellbeing’. It starts by considering the health of the army in the mid-nineteenth century and the emergence of military hygiene as a professional subject. It continues by looking at advances in military hygiene in the two world wars. Hygiene was replaced by the term ‘health’ in the 1950s as the collective noun used by professionals working in this field. This unity split when the professions of occupational medicine and public health established separate faculties and training pathways. However, the health issues for the armed forces remain fundamentally unchanged. Going forward, the term ‘wellbeing’ is helping to refresh the close relationships between executives, their medical advisers and those within the population of health professions charged with keeping the British Army healthy. The core theme is the collaborations between civil society, executive leadership and medical services in maximizing the health of the military population from recruitment through to life as a veteran.
Highlights
This paper reviews the evolution of the conceptual framework for sustaining the health of the British Army as an occupational group from the introduction of military ‘hygiene’ in the middle of the nineteenth century to that of ‘wellbeing’ in the early twenty-first century
Army Health separation into Public Health and Occupational Medicine in the 1970s This integrated Army Health Organisation continued until the late 1970s, when postgraduate professional training for medical officers in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) was formally structured into general practice, hospital specialities and a new grouping, namely, Army Community and Occupational Medicine (ACOM)
The language has changed, the core issues regarding the health of the British Army remain
Summary
This paper reviews the evolution of the conceptual framework for sustaining the health of the British Army as an occupational group from the introduction of military ‘hygiene’ in the middle of the nineteenth century to that of ‘wellbeing’ in the early twenty-first century. In his presidential address of 1922 to the Navy, Army and Air Force groups of the civilian Society of Medical Officers of Health, Major General Sir William Macpherson [14] summarized military hygiene as ‘the maintenance of physical fitness, physical training, the hygiene ‘of the march’, the relationship between food and energy and camp sanitation’.
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