The Politics of Wounds: Pain, Disability and Society 1914-1925

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The Politics of Wounds asks what does it mean to be wounded in war - and how can history help us to assess the legacies of this significant outcome of conflict? It examines WW1 as an industrialised and medicalised war that created new systems to treat the mass wounding of British citizen soldiers. It investigates how these systems fundamentally shaped medical services and military policies regarding the disabled that have impacted on soldiers, civilians and practitioners of rehabilitation ever since. This book uncovers a significant degree of political contestation about how the State would care for its wounded men. This involved political wrangling at the highest level, commissions of enquiry, media propaganda campaigns for civilian and troop morale, as well as behind-the-scenes conflicts between politicians, military personnel and medical practitioners (both regulars and civilian consultants). Humanitarian medicine and welfare agencies also mobilised the wounded body with its own agendas, influencing social and economic values that shaped public attitudes to disabled men. The outcome of wounding for men was often poverty and social dislocation, and it was families that had to meet the financial and emotional gap between the state's provisions and welfare support. Resisting the myths of the wounded as either victims or heroes, this book explores the complexity of individual experiences, including how pain was dealt with, alongside recovery and poverty, and how masculine embodied identity was reconstructed after wounding. This book brings to light untapped sources from the rank and file in conjunction with official documents; while the story of war is often told from a powerful institutional perspective, this book highlights wounded and disabled men's voices. A second significant thread is to illuminate the social, economic and political value of the wounded body, and to consider continuity and change since WW1, especially in regard to policies, pensions and public attitudes. How did the First World War shape the conditions of military medicine and the social meaning of wounds and disablement in the present day?The Politics of Wounds offers a new methodology, bringing together the study of military and medical history with the social and cultural history of war, and drawing upon phenomenological analysis of the wounded body 'that matters' (Butler), as well as anthropological and sociological studies into social relations and institutional behaviour. It also imports historical analysis into theoretical discussions about embodiment and identity, and draws significantly upon disability studies to question the political implications of disablement in wartime.This project will produce a significant advance in the comprehension of the impact of war on the wounded, on the social and economic value of the wounded body in military medicine, in political debate, in humanitarian welfare, and in public attitudes to the war disabled. It will be of significant use for academics from a range of disciplines, as well as contemporary practitioners of public medicine and military policy. This book offers a timely analysis at an important juncture in British history, when the stories of the past can offer important lessons for our greater comprehension of the consequence of war through a socially intimate political history.