The first world war: healthy or hungry?

Abstract

The history of health and illness is not of mere antiquarian interest to historians of medicine; it is integral to an understanding of the impact of the social and economic policies of governments. The debate on the states of health in the 1930s, recently conducted in social and economic history journals, relates to whether or not government policies caused widespread malnutrition. The 'myth of the hungry thirties' was first challenged by economic historians, arguing that conditions in residual depressed areas should not obscure the overall picture of an improvement in the social and economic condition of the population as a whole, and that the government's policies of the 1930s were laying the basis of future prosperity. They argued that views to the contrary were mere socialist progaganda. Demographic and social historians have contributed to this revisionist account of the 1930s by analysing health statistics, making use of official reports of the Ministry of Health and national statistics relating to individual diseases, to show that unemployment and government policies did not endanger the health of the people. Other social historians have, however, challenged the evidence on which this new analysis of the health of the British people in the 1930s is based. They have pointed to the danger of accepting official health reports at face value, for officialdom was not without political interest; and they have shown how health statistics themselves, being open to interpretation, do not provide an objective scientific insight to the health of the times. In particular, national aggregate statistics are shown to be of