Fatigue in Britain: Work, Medicine and Society, 1914-1945. (360G-Wellcome-104927_Z_14_Z)

This project looks at fatigue and work in Britain from 1914 to 1945. It examines how political and economic concerns influenced the production of medical knowledge of fatigue, and how concepts of fatigue in turn penetrated ways of thinking about society. In contrast to a postwar period in which fatigue has increasingly been seen as a matter of individual responsibility or pathology, from the First World War and through the interwar period, I argue, workers' fatigue was an issue of major publi c significance. The working body became a symbolic focus for discourses over national efficiency, productivity and the welfare of the population. The fatigued working body became a point around which anxieties over the state of the nation were organised, and a key locus for the production of medical knowledge. The key goals are: to establish the contexts in which fatigue emerged as an issue of public significance and an object of medical and political inquiry; to examine the physiological and psychological models of fatigue developed in this period; to determine how the fatigue of workers was contested politically; to determine the effect of World War Two on the medical conceptualisation and social significance of fatigue.