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E-book Sick Note : A History of the British Welfare State

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Darren Anderton played 30 times for the England men’s national football team and made 299 Premier League appearances for Tottenham Hotspur. To fans of a certain age, he is known by another name: ‘Sicknote’. ‘I had a migraine and was throwing up before a Portsmouth game’, recounted Anderton in 2016, some eight years after his final Football League match. ‘The next day at training, someone laughed, “Oh, Sicknote’s here.” Nothing came of it until I joined Spurs and had that first groin problem three or four years later. One of the press boys who had covered Pompey picked up on it and that was it.’1The nickname resonated because it meant something to 1990s’ British football fans. Just as everyone knew what sort of character Bert Quigley was when he was introduced as ‘Sicknote’ in ITV’s 1980s’ serial drama London’s Burning. He was, according to the fan-edited ‘Wiki’ entry about the show, ‘thin-skinned, pompous... a chronic hypochondriac, and constantly moaned about his ailments, from toothache to backache, which earned him his nickname.’2 For both Quigley and Anderton, the moniker could be deployed to attack a supposed moral failing in the individual. As a firefighter and a professional footballer respectively, there was a sense that both ought to remain physically robust and be willing to function through pain, injury, and illness. At the same time, there was something endearing about the two characters. Everyone, after all, gets sick.This book is a history of the welfare state told through the lens of the sick note. These slips of paper, signed by a doctor, were used by employers and government authorities as evidence that an individual was incapacitated for work. In this way, they provide a unique vantage point on postwar British social policy. They sit at the intersection between employment, health, and social security—three of Beveridge’s solutions to the ‘five giants’ that had ravaged interwar Britain.3 Through exploring the major policy changes around medical certification (as well as the political, social, and cultural shifts that inspired them), Sick Note shows the contrasts between the welfare state’s complex design and its ability to operate in practice. Employers, workers, doctors, civil servants, and politicians all had intimate experience of using, writing, or receiving medical certificates—and all expressed frustration that sick notes did not always suit their needs. Still, all needed some way to prove—or, indeed, disprove—that an individual was ‘really’ sick. These arguments exposed how the various parts of the welfare state interconnected, how they were designed to work, how they operated in practice, and what different constituencies hoped they might one day become. Because, despite their flaws, sick notes remained. They worked well enough in just enough areas to be a more attractive proposition than any realistic alternative. In this sense, they were a perfect metaphor for the welfare state itself.What Is a Sick Note?There is a long history of people providing evidence of sickness to avoid obligations. Katherine Foxhall’s work on migraine since the Middle Ages shows correspondence between individuals apologizing for missing important social events due to severe headaches.4 James Riley demonstrates that mutual funds for sick workers in the early-modern era would require paperwork detailing symptoms. By the mid-nineteenth century, the verification of such symptoms and diagnoses increasingly fell on the shoulders of licensed physicians.5 Medical certificates of this kind, for reasons that will be explored below and in Chapter 2, flourished across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Doctors were asked to pronounce: the time and cause of death; the mental fitness of an accused person to stand trial; suitability for recruitment to the armed forces; the extent of industrial injuries; whether a person should receive more rations or access to restricted goods in wartime; and much more besides.6Sick Note is interested in a specific form of medical testimony, one that came to be known colloquially in Britain as ‘the sick note’: the National Insurance medical certificate. Across the postwar period, this was the type of certificate that general practitioners (GPs) were asked to write most frequently. They acted as the formal 4Katherine Foxhall, Migraine: A History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), esp. pp. 61–2.5James C. Riley, ‘Sickness in an early modern workplace’, Continuity and Change 2, no. 3 (1987): pp. 363–85; James C. Riley, Sick, Not Dead: The Health of British Working Men During the Mortality Decline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Charles Hardwick, The History, Present Position, and Social Importance of Friendly Societies (London: Routledge, Warne and Routledge, 1859).6On some of these types of certification and their historical uses, see: Ian A. Burney, Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830–1826 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Janet Weston, ‘Managing mental incapacity in the 20th century: A history of the Court of Protection of England & Wales’, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 68 (2020); Emma Newlands, Civilians into Soldiers: War, the Body and British Army Recruits, 1939–45(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); Kirsti Bohata, Alexandra Jones, Mike Mantin, and Steve Thompson, Disability in Industrial Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

940 MIL s

Penerbit

London : Oxford University Press., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

245 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

978019286574

Klasifikasi

940

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

HIstory of Europe

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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