Stress in Post-War Britain, 1945–85

Excerpt

Adopting a wide range of sources, methods and perspectives, contributors to this volume collectively challenge simplistic narratives of stress and distress in post-war Britain. Tracing the language, concepts and experiences of stress through the post-war decades, the chapters explore the manner in which work and home, as well as war and peace, dictated patterns of mental and physical health. They reveal how employers and doctors, as well as employees and patients, measured and disputed the relative impact of external circumstances and individual temperament on the capacity to adapt to social and cultural change, how normative accounts of masculine strength and feminine frailty determined how men and women were seen to cope with stress, and how scientific investigations of mind and body were integrated into a complex model of disease that has continued to prescribe approaches to health and happiness well into the twenty-first century.