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Dissertation Information for Jeffrey Stephen Reznick

NAME:
- Jeffrey Stephen Reznick

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (1999)

ADVISORS:
- Margot C Finn

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Walter L. Adamson
- Kathryn E Amdur

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Rest, recovery, and rehabilitation: Healing and identity in Great Britain in the First World War

Abstract: This dissertation examines the endurance and evolution of systems of medical healing and social welfare in World War I to reveal how existing beliefs about and practices of caregiving served to structure rest huts and military hospitals, key sites in which British voluntary-aid and military-medical authorities cared for weary, sick, and wounded soldiers. In emphasizing continuity, this study confirms recent scholars' arguments that the period ca. 1914-1918 was not universally a period of dramatic transformation, but rather a time during which contemporaries made sense of events through traditional points of reference. But within this framework of continuity, I also explore change over time by analyzing the refashioning of Britain\\\\\\\'s wartime caregiving efforts in terms of the \\\\\\\"war machine,\\\\\\\" a system of efficient organization, administration, and production itself rooted in nineteenth-century attitudes toward war but which during the Great War helped to shape British responses to new, wartime concerns about efficiency, economy, morale, and state intervention. Interpreting rest huts and hospitals in this way reveals the implications that these sites had for the masculinity of soldiers who had \\\\\\\"done their bit\\\\\\\" for King and country. Voluntary-aid officials saw rest huts as \\\\\\\"homes away from home\\\\\\\" where weary soldiers could--indeed should--retain their identity as defenders of home and family. Military-medical authorities saw hospitals as peaceful and comfortable environs where recovering soldiers were supposed to be praised as heroes. While soldiers appreciated rest huts for the comforts they provided, they also saw key features of daily life in military hospitals, including medical treatments, recreational activities, diet, and clothing requirements, as sources of discipline that undercut their sense of heroism and masculinity. In identifying these different views of rest huts and hospitals, this study underlines the centrality of the experience of caregiving in the sharp distinctions that developed during and after the war between the experience of suffering by soldiers themselves, on the one hand, and the rhetoric of common suffering expounded the government and the elite opinion makers, on the other.

MPACT Scores for Jeffrey Stephen Reznick

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-03-27 08:40:10

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Students under Jeffrey Stephen Reznick

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None