3 - The Rockefeller Foundation and the Culture of British Medicine

Summary

RF perceptions of Britain require understanding within two wider frameworks, one encompassing the other. First is RF global policy and strategy. Perceptions of, and interventions in, British medicine were not simply local but very much a part of a panoramic view. Second, RF global policy itself needs situating within America's social, political, economic, and cultural relations with Europe, and indeed much of the world, in the first decades of the twentieth century.To deal with the latter first: in a valuable corrective to the thesis of American exceptionalism, Daniel T. Rodgers has argued that in areas of social policy (poor relief, housing, town planning, workmen's insurance etc.) from the 1870s Americans were deeply interested in European ideas and practices. Indeed, before 1914 the arrow of what was deemed progressive change ran largely from Europe to America.American interest in European ideas continued during and after the war. However, matters were different. After 1918 (and a little before), on both sides of the Atlantic, the word “reconstruction” was on everyone's lips. Americans were concerned to reconstruct at home and later they pressed to be involved in the reconstruction of Europe. After the armistice, American intervention in Europe was devoted to relief; for example the American Red Cross was involved in picking up the pieces in war-torn France. Later, however, relief turned to reconstruction and, to take the example of France again, attempts were made to rebuild villages and towns in conformity with the Europe of the American imagination. But, as is well known, the 1920s also saw a changed relationship with America, notably in the importation into Europe of American engineering techniques and mass-produced consumer goods. This development was identified by many as an aspect of modernism. “Fordism,” the assembly line production of standardized goods, was a key term of the decade. America's mass production economy, which was seen to serve the needs of the many rather than the few, was welcomed by progressives in Europe as an important post-war development and a milestone in economic and social growth.Technology and organization were seen jointly as the key to “an orderly community of abundance.” Conservatives, however, saw in the transatlantic commodity invasion a destruction of traditional European culture.