Book Reviews: Of Medicine and Men: Biographies and Ideas in European Social Medicine between the World Wars.

When a group of scholars from the Wellcome Institute in London and academics from public health education set up the Society for Social History of Medicine in 1970 their stated goal was to broaden a discipline in order to address the relationship of medicine and society. And that meant redefining an academic discipline that had been more or less practised by associations such as the Osler Society of London as the intellectual history of great men in medicine. For some decades subsequently the role of biography in the history of health and medicine was even more disparaged than intellectual and political biographies were by the broader world of academic historical scholarship. However, as Patrick Zyberman comments in a fascinating essay on ‘A Posthumous Audit’, the death of biography in the social and cultural history of health, medicine and science was much exaggerated with a ‘spectacular upsurge’ in biographical publications in the mid-1980s. As Iris Borowy points out in her introduction to this excellent volume, perhaps the continued value of biography as a means of excavating the past and as a heuristic for interpreting pivotal historical transformations is because it remained a genre that could communicate to audiences both within and beyond the world of academic scholarship. Because if, at its most axiomatic, history is the lives of socially interacting and organising individuals then all history is as much narrative as it is structural analysis. Zyberman emphasises, though, that contemporary biographical inquiry does not reproduce the eulogic trope of the great man. Instead biographies of individuals, involved, for example, in public health, are more likely nowadays to be accounts of what Zyberman persuasively refers to as ‘epistemic communities’, and the role played by their interconnections and interactions in transformative historical junctures and disjunctures in which they significantly participated. It would be hard to find a better example of what Zyberman is describing than this volume of essays on a group of actors between the wars who were critical figures in the development of public health internationalism as an interdisciplinary discourse and practice. Perhaps the most intriguing issue brought out by this book is that this group of health internationalists agreed intellectually about the political nature of improving population health while possessing a widely disparate range of ideological beliefs. As Borowy points out, they all linked population disease and health management to political action while their ideological beliefs, actions and associations varied hugely at a time of volatile national and international relations. Those in continental Europe who were socialists or social democrats fell foul of fascism in Germany and Spain. One such was the Jewish public health expert, Franz Goldman, who escaped to save his life. The Minister of Public Health in Yugoslavia, a communist sympathiser and tireless champion of social justice, Andrija Stampar, was more or less exiled by his government as the result of pre-war political intrigue but during the war was imprisoned by the German occupying forces. While all the figures in the volume shared beliefs about the effects of inequality upon population health, some—such as the pathologist Bela Johan in Hungary, and the German social hygienist Otto Olsen—found it possible diplomatically to co-operate with war-time fascism. Others within Germany, such as Fritz Rott, became National Socialists embracing racial hygiene. The brilliant German statistician, Emile Roesele, a communist, remained alive because of his unique indispensability. In neutral Denmark, the eminent serologist, Thorvald Masdan, retreated from the fray to his laboratory. He was accused by some of possessing pro-Axis sentiments. At least one of the internationalists in the collection, Gustavo Pittaluga, was dismissed from his public health role by totalitarian and democratic governments in Spain becoming a refugee in Cuba following the Second World War. Melville Macenzie, the public health lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and tireless champion of the LNHO, became stuck in British imperialist philosophy. As Borowy comments, despite these mixed fortunes, all collectively contributed to what Martin Dubin has termed ‘a biomedical/public health episteme’ that characterised international health co-operation between the wars. Perhaps the unifying element was that each of the public health campaigners was supported by funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and had links with a critical figure explored by Socrates Listios, Selskar ‘Mike’ Gunn. The Director of the Foundation’s Paris Office from 1922–32 facilitated the expanded visions of public health possessed by others explored in the volume but largely in contradiction to the limited strategic goals of the institution he represented. While all these short biographies reflect intriguing contrasts in the relationship between political ideology and public health philosophy, all demonstrate what Iris Borowy compellingly argues has been the role that collective action undertaken in pursuit of population health played in contributing toward the mission to construct a global civil society.