Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body by Steffan Blayney (review)

Reviewed by:

• Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Bodyby Steffan Blayney
• Whitney Laemmli

Steffan Blayney. Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body. Activist Studies of Science & Technology. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2022. xii + 248 pp. Ill. $28.95 (978-1-62534-649-0).

Pop open a jar of Bovril in 1916 and you would have encountered a thick, glossy paste with a salty tang and the powerful odor of meat. The substance, first known as Johnston's Fluid Beef, had been developed for Napoleon III's troops in the Franco-Prussian War, but by the first decades of the twentieth century it had become a [End Page 652]popular consumer good in Britain. Some savored Bovril slathered on toast with a bit of butter; others diluted it with water to make a warm "beef tea." As Steffan Blayney discusses in his Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body, however, Bovril's popularity was not the result of a spontaneous burst of enthusiasm for meat goo. Instead, its ubiquity was entwined with its maker's promise that Bovril could banish fatigue and boost energy among the country's industrial workers, transforming the "imperfect biological material of the human body" into a "maximally efficient productive machine" (p. 118).

Indeed, Blayney uses Bovril—alongside a host of other foodstuffs, medical products, and factory floor interventions—as part of the book's larger effort to examine the development and consequences of the "new sciences of work" in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Beginning by exploring how developments in late nineteenth-century thermodynamics helped produce an idea of the human body as a machine amenable to optimization, Blayney then traces the effects of this conceptual shift on physiological and psychological research, workplace practice, popular culture, and workers' own bodies. The broad outlines of this story—including the hope that the right kind of scientific expertise could provide an "objective," politically neutral solution to the problem of worker unrest—will likely be familiar, especially to readers of Anson Rabinbach's classic text The Human Motor. ¹

But while Rabinbach focused on developments in continental Europe and the United States, Blayney trains his attention on the United Kingdom, rooting his discussion in the specifics of national dynamics and institutions, including World War I's Health of Munition Workers Committee and the interwar period's Industrial Fatigue Research Board and National Institute of Industrial Psychology. Blayney also pays special attention to the ways in which industrial physiology and industrial psychology eventually supplanted the more obviously coercive techniques of scientific management. He argues convincingly, however, that despite their ostensible attention to the "human factor," these disciplines were still driven primarily by employers' desire for productivity rather than by concern for workers' own sense of well-being. In fact, for historians of medicine, Blayney's most interesting contribution may be his investigation of the ways in which the sciences of work ultimately reshaped ideas about health itself, making the definition of wellness contingent on the needs of capital. As he explains, "For the science of work, health and efficiency were not merely complementary: increasingly, they were taken to be identical. In this context, any suggestion that greater efficiency could be won at the expenseof workers' health would come to be seen as a contradiction in terms" (p. 5).

In this light, the most notable chapter of the book is its final one, which excavates the voices of workers themselves. Drawing on trade union papers, unpublished autobiographies, and offhand remarks by factory investigators, Blayney's command of these novel sources vividly conveys the toll this kind of labor took, [End Page 653]both exhausting the body and dulling the emotions. Blayney suggests that this utter depletion often impeded political action, but also calls attention to the ways in which it occasionally provoked new kinds of resistance: as one London laborer put it, his conversion to communism began as "a physical sensation rather than an intellectual one" (p. 166).

Blayney mentions in passing that Bovril took its name from Vril, the powerful...