The Rise And Fall Of The Healthy Factory

The first account of the emergence and demise of preventive health care for workers. It explores how trade unions, employers, doctors and the government reconfigured the relationship between health, productivity and the factory over the course of the twentieth century within a broader political, industrial and social context.

This book is open access under a CC BY license and explores the under-researched history of male mental illness from the mid-twentieth century. It argues that statistics suggesting women have been more vulnerable to depression and anxiety are misleading since they underplay a host of alternative presentations of 'distress' more common in men.

A comprehensive study of the occupational health of employed children within the broader context of social, industrial and environmental change between 1780 and 1850.

In the early 21st century, radically changing work locations and patterns have jolted society to reflect more on the ways that employment affects the body and the mind. This book provides historical context and insights to aid our understanding of this contemporary crisis, critically examining the history of a neglected area. In this oral-history based study, Arthur McIvor explores the history of health and safety from Second World War to the present, drawing extensively upon workers' own personal stories of occupational accidents, disasters, injury, disease, overwork and disability. It covers a wide range of workplace issues, from stories of TNT poisoning and overwork in wartime, through to the asbestos and black lung disasters, and the modern-day 'epidemics' of stress, burn-out and Covid-19. Opening conversations surrounding the harms caused by work, this book analyses how people have lived with occupational illness and disability, critiquing risk and work-health cultures, and the structural violence characteristic of industrial capitalism and neoliberal economics, in addition to discussing the agency of big business and advocacy of workers and victims. Focusing on class, gender, disability and race, this book uses an impressive range of secondary and primary sources, including government reports and enquiries drawing upon workers' testimonies, Mine and Factory Inspectors Reports, HSE papers, newspapers, Mass Observation responses and oral history interviews.

This first major study of girls' health in modern Britain explores how debates and advice on healthy girlhood shaped ideas about the lives of young women from the 1870s to the 1920s, as theories concerning the biological limitations of female adolescence were challenged and girls moved into new arenas in the workplace, sport and recreation.

This book provides an overview of a diverse array of preventive strategies relating to mental illness, and identifies their achievements and shortcomings. The chapters in this collection illustrate how researchers, clinicians and policy makers drew inspiration from divergent fields of knowledge and practice: from eugenics, genetics and medication to mental hygiene, child guidance, social welfare, public health and education; from risk management to radical and social psychiatry, architectural design and environmental psychology. It highlights the shifting patterns of biological, social and psychodynamic models, while adopting a gender perspective and considering professional developments as well as changing social and legal contexts, including deinstitutionalisation and social movements. Through vigorous research, the contributors demonstrate that preventive approaches to mental health have a long history, and point to the conclusion that it might well be possible to learn from such historical attempts. The book also explores which of these approaches are worth considering in future and which are best confined to the past. Within this context, the book aims at stoking and informing debate and conversation about how to prevent mental illness and improve mental health in the years to come. Chapters 3, 10, and 12 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

Janet Greenlees examines the working environments of the heartlands of the British and American cotton textile industries from the nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. She contends that the air quality within these pioneering workplaces was a key contributor to the health of the wider communities of which they were a part.

For seasoned professionals as well as students, A History of Public Health is visionary and essential reading.