? ? The goal of this project is to produce a book that explores working-class health culture and experience of public health and medical services in the Lancashire (England) communities Barrow, Lancaster, and Preston between about 1880 and 1970. Based primarily on 250 oral history interviews of working-class residents born between 1872 and 1958 and annual reports of the Medical Officers of Health for these communities, this book considers gender, class, political, economic, and cultural aspects of the mid-twentieth-century shift in responsibility for health, illness, birth, and death from the informal domestic and neighborhood sphere to the purview of professional institutionally-based authorities. Located within the context of national concern about working-class mortality, fitness, and living conditions, the book will document the processes through which working-class people abandoned traditional ways of dealing with ill health and accepted official health culture and medical provision. These processes included surveillance, education, intervention, and enforcement activities of public health authorities; changes in working-class health culture resulting from contact with official health care, participation in state education, and exposure to the mass media; and implementation of national policies that expanded health services and reduced barriers to working-class use of those services. This monograph will be the only available historical work to focus on twentieth-century working-class experience of health and illness in specific English communities, thus expanding the perspective and understanding of medical historians who have generally focused on the development of biomedical theories and professional and institutional medicine in national contexts. Because of its foundation in oral evidence, it will enhance historical understanding of consumers' experience of health policy and health care--phenomena and services that are usually studied from the perspectives of policy-makers and care-givers. Funding is required to support remaining research and composition of a draft manuscript. ? ? ? ?
