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Mark Jackson (ed.), Health and the modern home , Routledge Studies in the Social History of Medicine, No. 31, New York and Abingdon, Routledge, 2007, pp. ix, 339, £60.00 (hardback 978-0-415-95610-9).

This substantial and excellently edited collection of essays faces up to some of the big variables in contemporary and recent social and medical history—home, environment, modernity, health. In his introduction, Mark Jackson admits that the volume is only a preliminary beating of the bounds rather than a definitive map of an area that still borders on terra incognita. Pondering these essays, a reader may conclude that, in addition to being a foreign country, the past becomes ever odder and more alien when it lies so chronologically close to hand. Older subscribers to Medical History will come across essays—by John Stewart on child guidance, Sarah Hayes on maladjustment, and Ali Haggett, Jo Gill and Rhodri Hayward on women’s “suburban neurosis”—that summon up yesterday’s yellowing headlines and ways of conceptualizing social problems. Most of these are now as antique as the First Crusade. 
 
A more committed engagement with transnational comparisons and a wider sampling of the ways in which the home has been sociologically theorized and conceptualized during the last thirty years would have strengthened the volume. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, so perceptive and predictive in her analysis of the twentieth-century ideal and anxiety-laden American home, makes a brief appearance. But nothing is said about Jurgen Habermas’s infuriatingly flawed, deeply suggestive and massively discussed work on the private and public spheres. Europe looms small in this collection and that reduces its impact. 
 
The USA, on the other hand, is heavily featured. Jo Gill bases her arguments on a close reading of Anne Sexton—exhilarating to come across a major twentieth-century poet in a collection on socio-medical history. The ever reliable and incisive Nancy Tomes examines the kinds of advertising that accounted for the presence of so many “skeletons in the cupboard” in inter-war American homes. Gregg Mitman provides a titillating flyer for his recent and brilliant monograph on the history of asthma and allergies. (In their contributions, Mark Jackson and John Welshman do the same for their excellent surveys of allergy and social science, housing and transmitted deprivation respectively.) The British-based Matthew Smith probes the now long forgotten Feingold diet and its inventor’s best-selling Why your child is hyperactive—more yellowing headlines loom into consciousness. Smith ventures that Feingold’s idea may soon come lumbering back into fashion. This is an excellent essay on an important theme. 
 
Some of these essays pinpoint significant similarities between experience and practice in America and the UK. However, in his synoptic survey of child guidance, John Stewart detects British social workers predictably shying away from psychiatric theory. Stewart also notes that, “not for the first time in British welfare history, the child slipped from view, to be replaced by an attitude that … ‘blamed’ parents for children’s mental or emotional ‘ill-health’” (p. 123). Unlikely stirrings of R D Laing avant la lettre? Several essays focus on social workers, psychiatric social workers and other newly self-confident state-driven, progressive professionals, and sub-professionals ever more assuredly breaching the defences of middle-class suburban privacy. But too little is said about working-class experiences. (Welshman is an exemplary exception.) Laudably, several of the contributions challenge social-historical orthodoxy—Hayward excellently summarizes heavily documented recent scholarly interpretations of housewives’ alienation and ennui on post-war housing estates that have echoed and reinforced rather than interrogated contemporary headlines. Health and the modern home would not have been written fifteen years ago, when medical and social and cultural historians ploughed their own deep, separate and lonely furrows. 
 
Three articles fall into the domain of environmental history and each makes intriguing connections between the home and the world outside. Confirming his position as our leading chronicler of atmospheric pollution, Stephen Mosely extends his narrative up to 1945 and detects continuing attachment to the cosiness of the domestic hearth. (Would it ever end?) Catherine Mills presents a well documented account of differential response to the Clean Air Act of 1956 and dots the i’s and crosses the t’s of Peter Thorsheim’s recent and impressive history of air pollution in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. Focusing on childhood lead poisoning, the ever-reliable John Burnham tells a compelling tale and, together with Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy and Christopher Sellers, points to the “‘multitudinous exposures permeating our modern world’” (p. 298). This is a succinct and subtly theorized piece of work, which locates detail within a determinedly comparative framework. 
 
Finally, in the best essay in the volume, Michael Clark draws on theatrical and cinematic sources to examine marital breakdown in a dysfunctional upper-middle class family in the 1920s. Clemence Dane’s A bill of divorcement is rarely mentioned in the early twenty-first century. But between the early 1920s and 1940 it was a London stage smash that was filmed and refilmed in Britain and Hollywood. Clark uses Dane’s text and ideas to show that there were few grounds “for optimism about the effects of modernity on the health and happiness of young middle-class British women and their homes and families” (p. 36). As Jo Gill notes, a generation later the American confessional poet Anne Sexton would write: “I am actually a ‘suburban housewife’ only I write poems and am sometimes a little crazy” (p. 63). There is much more to be said about this topic and several of the others in Mark Jackson’s collection.