front cover of Health and Efficiency
Health and Efficiency
Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body
Steffan Blayney
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

A new model of health emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Centered on the working body, organized around the concept of efficiency, and grounded in scientific understandings of human labor, scientists, politicians, and capitalists of the era believed that national economic productivity could be maximized by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. At the core of this approach was the conviction that worker productivity was intimately connected to worker health.

Under this new “science of work,” fatigue was seen as the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers’ capacity to perform continued physical or mental labor. As Steffan Blayney shows, the equation between health and efficiency did not go unchallenged. While biomedical and psychological experts sought to render the body measurable, governable, and intelligible, ordinary men and women found ways to resist the logics of productivity and efficiency imposed on them, and to articulate alternative perspectives on work, health, and the body.

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front cover of Love and Fatigue in America
Love and Fatigue in America
Roger King
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012
When an Englishman receives an invitation from an American university, he embraces it as a jubilant new beginning. Instead, on arrival, he is stricken with a persistent inability to stand up or think straight. Diagnosed with ME disease—also called chronic fatigue syndrome—he moves restlessly across his newly adopted country, searching for a love and a life suited to his new condition. Love and Fatigue in America briskly compresses an illness, a nation, and an era in a masterly blend of literary forms.
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