Legacies of Altruism: Richard Titmuss, Marie Meinhardt, and Health Policy Research in the 1940s

Abstract

During the Second World War, a German economist, Marie Dessauer, later Marie Meinhardt, worked with the British welfare state scholar and policy analyst Richard Titmuss on pioneering studies of social factors and health. Titmuss is remembered today for his role in establishing social policy as an academic discipline, and for his internationally-renowned works on welfare, health and public policy. Meinhardt's career as an economist has been largely forgotten. This was an unusual alliance with far-reaching consequences, as Meinhardt later bequeathed a large sum of money to the London School of Economics, where Titmuss worked, to help fund social policy students and research. This article documents the story of the Titmuss-Meinhardt collaboration, locating it in the context of Titmuss's last and probably best-known work, The Gift Relationship, which analyses the function of altruistic giving in promoting healthy and democratic social relations.

A fetus in the world: Physiology, epidemiology, and the making of fetal origins of adult disease

“…Late to develop in Britain compared to most other European countries, the formal discipline of social medicine grew out interwar interest in the social aspects of health and disease, in the work of Richard Titmuss and John Ryle, among others (Oakley, 1991 , 2019 ). 5 But significant support for social medicine emerged only in the 1940s amid a general surge in interest in social issues and support for redistributive social policies.…”