Theatre in Britain during the Second World War

Changes in Scottish suicide rates during the Second World War

BACKGROUND It is believed that total reported suicide rates tend to decrease during wartime. However, analysis of suicide rates during recent conflicts suggests a more complex picture, with increases in some age groups and changes in method choice. As few age and gender specific analyses of more distant conflicts have been conducted, it is not clear if these findings reflect a change in the epi...

Clinical Trials and the Reorganization of Medical Research in post-Second World War Britain

The rise of biomedicine is usually associated with the transformation of biological and medical research in the United States following the vast expansion of funding, both private and public, in the years after the Second World War. Along with the other authors in this issue, we are interested in describing this phenomenon in national contexts other than the United States. Our discussion of bio...

'The gut war': Functional somatic disorders in the UK during the Second World War.

Hospital admission and mortality statistics suggested that peptic ulcer reached a peak prevalence in the mid-1950s. During the Second World War, against this background of serious and common pathology, an epidemic of dyspepsia afflicted both service personnel and civilians alike. In the absence of reliable diagnostic techniques, physicians struggled to distinguish between life-threatening illne...

Typhus Fever in the Second World War.

The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain

During the First World War, the horror of facial mutilation was evoked in journalism, poems, memoirs and fiction; but in Britain it was almost never represented visually outside the professional contexts of clinical medicine and medical history. This article asks why, and offers an account of British visual culture in which visual anxiety and aversion are of central importance. By comparing the...