Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain During the Great War

This book is a study of caregiving during the Great War, exploring life behind the lines for ordinary British soldiers who served on the Western Front. Using a variety of literary, artistic, and architectural evidence, Reznick draws connections between the war machine and the wartime culture of caregiving: the product of medical knowledge and procedure, social relationships and health institutions that informed experiences of rest, recovery and rehabilitation in sites administered by military and voluntary-aid authorities. Rest huts, hospitals, and rehabilitation centres served not only as means to sustain manpower and support for the war but also as distinctive sites where soldiers, their caregivers and the public attempted to make sense of the conflict and the unprecedented change it wrought. Revealing aspects of wartime life that have received little attention, this book shows that Britain’s ‘generation of 1914’ was a group bound as much by a comradeship of healing as by a comradeship of the trenches.