From August 1940 until May 1941, Germany subjected Great Britain to air bombardments by night and day. Desmond Flower recalled how London shook as the first bombs hit the docks, while in early September 1940, nurse Frances Faviell described London's casualties as, “bodies, limbs, blood and flesh mingled with little hats, coats, and shoes”.1 Despite this onslaught and the ‘“Blind savagery” of night attacks’, The Times described a courageous dignity among the citizenry.2 Continuing this pattern in his private correspondence, the Edinburgh psychiatrist David Kennedy Henderson would write in the New Year to his American colleague, Adolf Meyer, that: In such times as these the potential neurotic or psychotic pulls himself together a bit, he wants to put on a face as good and as great as any other man, he rises to the occasion and in consequence consultation work and admission to hospital are rather less than in ordinary times.3 Such public and private sentiments were commonplace and echoed the personal, societal, and political need to appear courageous, as well as controlled, unified, and unwavering in morale.4 In various ways, it was a language of reassurance: one that comforted the British population at home while also heightening the confidence of her allies abroad that Britain would carry on. This rhetoric of fortitude was becoming one of the lifelines of Britain's national sovereignty.5 Scholars often discount the effects of such rhetoric on the production of science and the practice of medicine, yet such rhetoric is significant, especially when explored from outside the more traditional perspective of national history.6 This paper does that by emphasizing the connected context of biomedical science in Britain and North America during the early years of the Second World War. At the time of the blitz, physicians and scientists on both sides of the Atlantic began developing informal structures and institutions to support a transnational biomedical research collaboration for the combined defence of Anglo-America.7 As this biomedical collaboration formalized slowly within institutions and government directives, relations at times became problematic.8 One area where differences arose concerned questions about the causes and incidence of civilian neuroses in Britain. Were air raids, for instance, causing increases? The rhetoric of the times suggested they were not, but was that merely the consequence of social policy? In Britain by 1940, physicians, cradled in the experience of treating patients with neuroses during the First World War, and now acting as advisers to the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Pensions, had crafted “a double-barrelled approach” to mental illness. This, according to Ben Shephard, treated real neurotics while discouraging civilian and military cases of war neuroses by suppressing “all mention of quasi-medical terms like ‘shell-shock’”, denying pensions for such cases, and making it “impossible for ‘neurosis’ to be used as grounds for getting discharged from the Army”.9 These policies, however, were not well understood by civilian scientists and physicians in the United States, who alleged that their collaborators were under-reporting the direct effects of the bombing on the civilian population. These differences exacted a toll by politicizing the transnational collaboration's aims, methods, and even its scientific conclusions. Nevertheless, the origins of this Anglo-American biomedical research alliance lay in a realm of assumed shared values, while the tensions of that assumption became inextricable from the joint endeavour in cooperation. The international context of the question of civilian neuroses in Britain, therefore, provides a site from which we can survey the resulting political tensions between government agencies and friends alike. This paper uses the case of this transnational collaboration to examine the limits of scientific objectivity in wartime Britain, while also calling attention to the ways this alliance helped to foster the transformation from the informal world of inter-war biomedicine to the structured government science found in Britain and North America in the post-war period.10
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Jun 11, 2019
Michael Robinson 
Open Access