“The People Who Write to Us Are the People Who Don't Like Us”: Class, Gender, and Citizenship in the Survey of Sickness, 1943–1952

Abstract

The Second World War and the rise of social medicine in 1940s Britain reframed population health as a social problem in need of state investigation. The resulting government inquiry, the Survey of Sickness, sampled the whole adult population of England and Wales, engaging a broad and diverse cross-section in public health research for the first time. Complaints made against the Survey of Sickness reveal a complex set of relationships between different sections of the public and the British state. This article situates complaints about privacy, liberty, and wasted resources, as well as challenges to the authority of survey fieldworkers, in the context of wider resistance to postwar controls. By viewing these protests and criticisms in light of the material circumstances of the people who made them, this article argues that, for those with social, economic, and political capital, the role of the public in public health was up for negotiation in postwar Britain. The everyday politics of the survey's doorstep encounters were heavily influenced by gendered notions of home and citizenship. This exploration of how different sections of the public were constructed by public health and how they responded to that construction describes the hierarchies of expertise under formation while illuminating how class and gender informed contemporary understandings of citizenship in the emerging postwar British state.

Ordinary People and the 1979 Royal Commission on the NHS

“…In Daisy Payling's article about post-war social surveys, she writes about the function of complaint. 102 She cites John Clarke's observation that complaints require 'going public' and leaving a record. He describes how 'complaints represent a hinterland of anxieties, doubts, and frustrations', or as Payling puts it, 'the public articulation of private grumblings shared by many people'.…”

The shadows of waiting and care: on discourses of waiting in the history of the British National Health Service.

“…As Stoler (2009) suggests, understanding the role of such materials within forms of government, and exploring the power involved in the constructions and uses of certain narratives, are important endeavours in themselves. Nonetheless, as Daisy Payling (2020) has shown in similar contexts of complaint, combining an attentiveness to the constructed nature of these sources, together with a careful reading of their embedded values and codes, can help us recuperate important accounts of waiting otherwise made marginal in the hegemonic discourses of explored here.…”

Making Noise in the Modern Hospital

“…Daisy Payling has shown that 'the Second World War and the rise of social medicine encouraged the conception of whole population health as a social problem worthy of social investigation'. 213 As 'health' in general was conceptualised in increasingly social terms, with the rise of social medicine, the qualitative tools of social science and social surveys became ever more important. The use of questionnaires to understand patient experience and the social aspects of illness, in particular, was still a relatively novel phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century.…”