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It started, as some things do, with a letter to the Lancet. It was January 1951, the Korean War was in full force, and the letter sought to draw attention to how military spending was impacting on healthcare. Signed by seven distinguished doctors - including Richard Doll, famous for his work on the link between lung cancer and smoking - it pulled few punches in its language: “Each pound spent on bombs means more dead babies now.”
As a post from the University of Bradford describes, not everyone in the profession agreed. These were political matters, of which there was no place in a largely scientific medical journal. But the original signatories disagreed, extending their argument to add a deeper health frame to the issue: “War is a symptom of mental ill health. Its results include wounds and disease. Doctors are therefore properly concerned in preventing it.”
A forum was set up to debate this further, and after a meeting in March 1961, the Medical Association for the Prevention of War (MAPW) was founded. The current organisation, Medact - who recently attracted attention for their role in the BMA’s decision to divest from fossil fuels - was founded in 1992, following the merger of MAPW with the similar Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (MCANW).
The history of MAPW - and a few similar groups - was recently marked at the the Wellcome Trust with the ‘Bed No Bombs’ conference launching their collection of the history of anti-nuclear medical campaigning and protest. A lively event, it included historical scholarship, personal reflections, photographs, archives of scientific research, newsclippings, banners and even song. Wellcome’s Elena Carter introduces her highlights of the collection in a post on Political Science today, and you can see a gallery of more of the archives too.
MAPW sits within a larger community of people active in the politics of science, technology and medicine of the late 20th century. As well as MCANW, we heard from Alison Macfarlane from the Radical Statistics Group, who also offered us some history of Radical Nursing, Radical Midwives and the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science. We learnt of the prestigious archive of Radical Statistics publications from 1975 onwards, and the way they applied a “fanzine principle” to put their works out and hope they would be passed on to people were interested. We learnt how their “Unsafe in their hands” leaflet - critiquing government’s use of statistics to talk about the NHS - ended up in Parliament, and was later used for an episode of Channel 4’s Dispatches.
There is also a larger history of post-war scientists against the bomb (e.g. Pugwash) which was largely associated by physicists but included biomedical researchers too. There’s another Wellcome link here. In 2007, they famously paid £250,000 for a Picasso initially drawn on the wall of scientist and peace activist JD Bernal after delegates to the 1950 World Peace Congress were stranded in London. Moreover, as Peter Peter van den Dungen, also speaking at the Bed Not Bombs event noted, there is a much longer history of ‘medics for peace’ work, far beyond nuclear weapons. Georg Friedrich Nicolai developed his idea of war as illness booklet in the light of the First World War, and there were responses to biological and chemical warfare, as well as the very idea of war, throughout the rest of the 20th century. Nuclear weapons brought a greater sense of urgency, as they did across the pacifist movement, but were not the entire story.
As an interesting presentation from Christoph Laucht noted, anti-nuclear protest was - oddly perhaps - marked by professional activism. There’s the old joke CND badge that ‘taxidermists say stuff the bomb’ but, whether a consequence of connections between peace and labour movements or something else, there was a proliferation of anti-war groups identified by particular careers. Teachers, musicians, nurses, all sorts.
This left the question of weather such activity could spark again? Could we have accountants for action on climate change, nurses against global warming, lawyers for a low carbon economy? Or are professions too tied up with immediate concerns of their own work, and individuals to busy, burdened by debt or simply disillusioned by the possibility for change to speak up? Or maybe, the critics of Doll et al in 1951, they simply don’t feel it is there place.
Alice Bell is a freelance writer and researcher currently working on a history of the radical science movement.
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