Awards

• Short-listed for Aberdare Literary Prize for Sports History 2012
• Short-listed for The Aberdare Literary Prize 2012 (UK)
• Shortlisted for Aberdare Literary Prize for Sports History 2012.

Overview

This book offers a comprehensive study, and social history, of the development of sports medicine in Britain, as practiced by British doctors and on British athletes in national and international settings. It takes as its focus the changing medical concept of the 'athletic body'. Athletes start the century as normal, healthy citizens, and end up as potentially unhealthy physiological 'freaks', while the general public are increasingly urged to do more exercise and play more sports. It also considers the origins and history of all the major institutions and organisations of British sports medicine, and shows how they interacted with and influenced international sports medicine and sporting events. As well as being an important read for anyone interested in 'body history', this volume will be essential reading for those studying or researching the history of modern medicine, sports, or twentieth century Britain more generally. -- .

Full Product Details

Author:   Vanessa Heggie ,  Rebecca Mortimer
Publisher:   Manchester University Press
Imprint:   Manchester University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 13.80cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 21.60cm
Weight:   0.522kg
ISBN:  

9780719082610

ISBN 10:   0719082617
Pages:   232
Publication Date:   04 January 2011
Audience:   General/trade ,  College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable  
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Table of Contents

Reviews

This is a timely history of a narrow specialty told in a way that will interest a much wider audience. Jon Agar, Endeavour, 12/12/2011 -- Jon Agar. Endeavour 20111212 The book can - and should - serve as a stimulus for further advancing our understandings of the history of sports medicine, of exercise science, and much more. Roberta J Park, Sport in History, 15/02/2012 -- Roberta J Park. Sport in History 20120215 (carves) out a useful niche in the growing sophistication of empirical research around the historical development of sports medicine and adds to the developing rapprochement among histories of the body, sport history, and histories of modern medicine Patricia Vertinsky, Twentieth Century British History, 27/02/2012 -- Patricia Vertinsky. Twentieth Century British History 20120227 The book is well researched and nicely paced...Heggie presents a convincing argument about the reconceptualization of the athletic body throughout the twentieth century, which shifts the focus away from the establishment of medical committees and sporting organizations, which is a refreshing perspective Julie Anderson, University of Kent, The British Journal for the History of Science, 01/03/2012 -- Julie Anderson. The British Journal for the History of Science 20120301 An important and interesting contribution to the sport science debate Susanna Hedenborg, Department of Sport Science, Malmo University -- Susanna Hedenborg. Department of Sport Science, Malmo University 'A History of British Sports Medicine' is a fine addition to broader social histories of medicine and should be of interest to all historians of medicine and sport ... this is an interesting and well-researched book on a subject' Social History of Medicine 25 (2) May 2012 -- .

This is a timely history of a narrow specialty told in a way that will interest a much wider audience. -- Jon Agar. Endeavour 20111212 The book can - and should - serve as a stimulus for further advancing our understandings of the history of sports medicine, of exercise science, and much more. -- Roberta J Park. Sport in History 20120215 One of the questions I like to ask my undergraduate kinesiology students is how one becomes a sports medicine doctor. Many of them aspire to this goal but few can articulate how to get there or identify the full scope of its wide-ranging and ever-growing activities. Like other medical specialities, sports medicine is interested in both the prevention and cure of disease, sickness, and injury, but it is also rather different for it has no identifiable hospital base and in practice it is a highly diverse, multi-practitioner, multi-disciplinary, multi-speciality activity, which includes general practitioners, surgeons, gynaecologists, orthopaedists, paediatricians, dieticians, physiotherapists, masseurs, rehabilitation therapists, physiologists, exercise scientists, psychologists, chiropractors, members of the armed forces, physical education teachers, coaches, athletic trainers, and a variety of others. Furthermore, it is interested (sometimes too interested say the courts) in enhancing as well as repairing the athletic body. Indeed, the alliance between medical science and high-performance sport has become a unique and increasingly controversial adventure in the history of the human species. This is the complex medical arena Vanessa Heggie sets out to analyse in A History of British Sports Medicine. Britain was the leader in the development of sports medicine she insists, contradicting the work of John Hoberman, for example, who has long claimed that the emergence of a scientifically based sports medicine a the end of the nineteenth century occurred earlier and more intensively in Germany than in any other country. Well before the feats of the athletic body took on such importance, says Hoberman, European scientists were speculating about - and attempting to measure - the physiological foundations of human abilities. Physical anthropologists, preoccupied with the measuring of bodies, fears about a lack of national fitness, and a flurry of physical education reforms all played a more important role in emergent European sports medicine than athletic performance. Roberta Park has also mounted considerable evidence to demonstrate how sports medicine emerged as a specialty in Germany decades before this would occur in either Britain or the USA. Heggie, however, insists that the British experience was somewhat different. Rather than interrogating approaches to sports medicine in other countries, she defends the primacy of British sports medicine organisation. 'The centrality of Britain and the world-leading nature of British sports medicine may come as a surprise, because it is common to hear British sports medicine described by the practitioners as backwards on the world stage; underfunded, undervalued, and unprofessional...Such an argument is unsupported by the evidence' (pp.8-9). She thus attempts to demolish many of the traditional explanations for the rise of sports medicine and establish a more 'fine-grained' approach to the subject. By this she means moving a focus away from the professional development of sports medicine as a medical specialty to one which places the athletic body at the centre of analysis. In order to support the charge that sports medicine has always been defined by the nature of its patients, Heggie shows how changing perspectives of the athletic body across the twentieth century have been enfolded into a slowly developing set of practices and organizational arrangements. In essence she claims that to become a specialization, sports medicine required a shift in an understanding of the athletic body (that is, a distinction had to be made between the normal athlete and the normal citizen). 'It is only when the athlete becomes not normal - that is both supernormal as well as abnormal - that one can have sports medicine as a distinct area of expertise' (p.3). This requires that either the activity of sport must be viewed as a special activity in terms of its biomedical consequences, or the athlete must become differentiated from a normal person, or both. It is an interesting argument though it tends to obscure the close connections between exercise, sport, and medicine for all age groups and in different regions of the world that goes back millennia. It also underplays the impact of gender, the cumulative role of school sports, physical culture, national fitness imperatives, and exercise for health in contributing to health and injury risks and ever-growing demands for access to sports medicine services in recent decades. Britain did not get its first professional sports medicine organization - the British Association of Sport and Medicine (BASM) - until 1952, though doctors and a wide range of affiliated medical professionals and members of the lay public (as well as sportsmen themselves) had been advising athletes on preventing injuries and treating wounded players on the sports field for decades. At the beginning of the twentieth century the athletic body was the archetype of the normal body; athletes were viewed as normal healthy citizens and medical services at local and national sporting events were patchy at best. It was high-profile events such as the modern Olympic Games, Heggie argues, which played a crucial role in highlighting human potential as well as rising levels of injury in high-level athletic performance that began to bring together increasing numbers of medical and scientific personnel. Indeed, Heggie, along with other historians, gives a prominent role to the influence of the Olympics in stimulating the formation of medical organizations focused on high-level athletes. The British Olympic Association appointed Adolphe Abrahams as its first Medical Officer in 1928, a year after the British physiologist Archibald Vivian Hill became the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine for his work on muscular movement in man and exercise fatigue. Doping and gender fraud at the Olympics then became critical objects of medical attention during the 1930s and 1940s and 'by 1952 the athletic body was in some respects no longer the avatar of healthy normality but rather supernormal, or even abnormal' (p.67). Sports medicine could become a specialty as the athletic body was seen to require special treatment, enhancement, and policing. With the advent of the 'new' public health in the 1970s and new demands for population fitness, sports doctors and sports scientists were pushed to find ways to map their specialist knowledge of the athletic back onto the body politic and address critical demands for healthy exercise and sport for all. And while sports medicine was recognized as a formal specialty in the UK in 2005 it had become, says Heggie, a holistic practice characterized by the tendentious question of 'fit for what?' Heggie thus introduces A History of British Sports Medicine as a starting point for the fine-grained research that the topic requires and nicely encapsulates the expanding power of medical knowledge in the production and regulation of sporting bodies. She clearly reveals twentieth-century sports medicine in Britain to be a complex, contingent, and heterogeneous set of practices, beliefs, and practitioners though her arguments concerning Britain's leadership in this arena are not entirely convincing. The book does, however, carve out a useful niche in the growing sophistication of empirical research around the historical development of sports medicine and adds to the developing rapprochement among histories of the body, sport history, and histories of modern medicine. -- Patricia Vertinsky Twentieth Century British History 20120227 (carves) out a useful niche in the growing sophistication of empirical research around the historical development of sports medicine and adds to the developing rapprochement among histories of the body, sport history, and histories of modern medicine -- Patricia Vertinsky. Twentieth Century British History 20120227 The book is well researched and nicely paced...Heggie presents a convincing argument about the reconceptualization of the athletic body throughout the twentieth century, which shifts the focus away from the establishment of medical committees and sporting organizations, which is a refreshing perspective. -- Julie Anderson. The British Journal for the History of Science 20120301 An important and interesting contribution to the sport science debate -- Susanna Hedenborg. Department of Sport Science, Malmo University

This is a timely history of a narrow specialty told in a way that will interest a much wider audience. Jon Agar, Endeavour, 12/12/2011 -- Jon Agar. Endeavour The book can - and should - serve as a stimulus for further advancing our understandings of the history of sports medicine, of exercise science, and much more. Roberta J Park, Sport in History, 15/02/2012 -- Roberta J Park. Sport in History (carves) out a useful niche in the growing sophistication of empirical research around the historical development of sports medicine and adds to the developing rapprochement among histories of the body, sport history, and histories of modern medicine Patricia Vertinsky, Twentieth Century British History, 27/02/2012 -- Patricia Vertinsky. Twentieth Century British History The book is well researched and nicely paced...Heggie presents a convincing argument about the reconceptualization of the athletic body throughout the twentieth century, which shifts the focus away from the establishment of medical committees and sporting organizations, which is a refreshing perspective Julie Anderson, University of Kent, The British Journal for the History of Science, 01/03/2012 -- Julie Anderson. The British Journal for the History of Science An important and interesting contribution to the sport science debate Susanna Hedenborg, Department of Sport Science, Malmo University -- Susanna Hedenborg. Department of Sport Science, Malmo University 'A History of British Sports Medicine' is a fine addition to broader social histories of medicine and should be of interest to all historians of medicine and sport ... this is an interesting and well-researched book on a subject' Social History of Medicine 25 (2) May 2012 -- .

This is a timely history of a narrow specialty told in a way that will interest a much wider audience. Jon Agar, Endeavour, 12/12/2011 The book can - and should - serve as a stimulus for further advancing our understandings of the history of sports medicine, of exercise science, and much more. Roberta J Park, Sport in History, 15/02/2012 (carves) out a useful niche in the growing sophistication of empirical research around the historical development of sports medicine and adds to the developing rapprochement among histories of the body, sport history, and histories of modern medicine Patricia Vertinsky, Twentieth Century British History, 27/02/2012 The book is well researched and nicely paced....Heggie presents a convincing argument about the reconceptualization of the athletic body throughout the twentieth century, which shifts the focus away from the establishment of medical committees and sporting organizations, which is a refreshing perspective Julie Anderson, University of Kent, The British Journal for the History of Science, 01/03/2012 An important and interesting contribution to the sport science debate Susanna Hedenborg, Department of Sport Science, Malmoe University 'A History of British Sports Medicine' is a fine addition to broader social histories of medicine and should be of interest to all historians of medicine and sport ... this is an interesting and well-researched book on a subject' Social History of Medicine 25 (2) May 2012 -- .

This is a timely history of a narrow specialty told in a way that will interest a much wider audience. Jon Agar, Endeavour, 12/12/2011 The book can - and should - serve as a stimulus for further advancing our understandings of the history of sports medicine, of exercise science, and much more. Roberta J Park, Sport in History, 15/02/2012 (carves) out a useful niche in the growing sophistication of empirical research around the historical development of sports medicine and adds to the developing rapprochement among histories of the body, sport history, and histories of modern medicine Patricia Vertinsky, Twentieth Century British History, 27/02/2012 The book is well researched and nicely paced...Heggie presents a convincing argument about the reconceptualization of the athletic body throughout the twentieth century, which shifts the focus away from the establishment of medical committees and sporting organizations, which is a refreshing perspective Julie Anderson, University of Kent, The British Journal for the History of Science, 01/03/2012 An important and interesting contribution to the sport science debate Susanna Hedenborg, Department of Sport Science, Malmo University 'A History of British Sports Medicine' is a fine addition to broader social histories of medicine and should be of interest to all historians of medicine and sport ... this is an interesting and well-researched book on a subject' Social History of Medicine 25 (2) May 2012 -- .

Author Information

Vanessa Heggie is Birmingham Research Fellow in the History of Medicine at University of Birmingham

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