Jeffrey Reznick - Böcker

Healing the Nation is a study of caregiving during the Great War, exploring life behind the lines for ordinary British soldiers who served on the Western Front. Using a variety of literary, artistic, and architectural evidence, this study draws connections between the war machine and the wartime culture of caregiving: the product of medical knowledge and procedure, social relationships and health institutions that informed experiences of rest, recovery and rehabilitation in sites administered by military and voluntary-aid authorities. Rest huts, hospitals, and rehabilitation centres served not only as means to sustain manpower and support for the war but also as distinctive sites where soldiers, their caregivers and the public attempted to make sense of the conflict and the unprecedented change it wrought. Revealing aspects of wartime life that have received little attention, this study shows that Britain’s ‘generation of 1914’ was a group bound as much by a comradeship of healing as by a comradeship of the trenches.The author has used an extensive collection of illustrations in his discussion, and the book will make fascinating reading for students and specialists in the history of war, medicine and gender studies.

Healing the nation is a study of caregiving during the Great War, exploring life behind the lines for ordinary British soldiers who served on the Western Front. Using a variety of literary, artistic, and architectural evidence, this study draws connections between the war machine and the wartime culture of caregiving: the product of medical knowledge and procedure, social relationships and health institutions that informed experiences of rest, recovery and rehabilitation in sites administered by military and voluntary-aid authorities. Rest huts, hospitals, and rehabilitation centres served not only as means to sustain manpower and support for the war but also as distinctive sites where soldiers, their caregivers and the public attempted to make sense of the conflict and the unprecedented change it wrought. Revealing aspects of wartime life that have received little attention, this study shows that Britain’s ‘generation of 1914’ was a group bound as much by a comradeship of healing as by a comradeship of the trenches.The author has used an extensive collection of illustrations in his discussion, and the book will make fascinating reading for students and specialists in the history of war, medicine and gender studies.

John Galsworthy – recipient of the 1932 Nobel Prize for literature – was one of the best-selling authors of the twentieth century. His literary reputation overshadows what he achieved during the Great War, which was his humanitarian support for and his compositions about soldiers disabled in the conflict.John Galsworthy and disabled soldiers of the Great War represents the most comprehensive study published to date about this literature of the ‘war to end all wars.’ It makes available for the first time in a single edition the most significant of his compositions about disabled soldiers, recovering them from scholarly neglect, examining their value as historical documents and connecting them to iconic images and artifacts of the period. This study will be of interest to a wide academic audience, to readers interested in the history of the Great War, to policymakers associated with veterans’ issues, and to medical professionals in the fields of physical medicine and rehabilitation.