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8 Fitness to serve The fifth ground for exemption laid out in the Military Service Act, 1916, and its successors was the demonstrable ill-health or infirmity of the applicant. Though the median fitness of the British male had been an obsessive concern in some quarters since the South African War (during which large numbers of volunteers had been rejected as physically inadequate to the task of soldiering), the peacetime Army, a small, professional force, had been able to maintain its strength from an adequate reservoir of fit young men between the ages of 19
has spawned a narcissistic culture of bodily fitness, healthy lifestyles and making good choices, while in the South, a post-humanitarian ethic has disaggregated, medicalised and reduced precarity to the basic nutritional, energy, health, sanitation, education, financial and psychic requirements needed to maintain bodily functioning ( Jaspars, 2015 ). Everywhere, resilience, or the injunction to endlessly adapt before unmediated market and environmental forces, has become the zeitgeist of late-modernity ( Evans and Reid, 2014 ). As the
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. 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 describes how and why, in Britain, medicine applied to sport became first an area of expertise known as sports medicine, and then a formal medical specialty: Sport and Exercise Medicine. In the late nineteenth century, vigorous exercise was an acceptable, probably necessary, part of the moderate healthy lifestyle for the normal, healthy man. Consequently sports medicine was part and parcel of normal medical treatment, distinguishable only through its location or through its patient history. There was no wide-spread de facto scepticism about the value of vigorous exercise among physicians and scientists. The normality of the young male athlete is reconsidered between 1928 and 1952. At the end of the period, the athlete becomes an abnormal or supernormal human being who demands specialist medical interventions. The formation and work of British Association of Sport and (Exercise) Medicine, the Institute of Sports Medicine, the Sports Council, and the British Olympic Association's Medical Committee is discussed. The book finally discusses fitness. Normal life, war, elite competition gives us an insight into how athletic bodies are conceptualised, and how sports medicine has formed and reformed over a century.
Linehan 06 13/6/07 11:32 Page 115 6 Tending the communist body: the quest for physical fitness Springiness, elasticity, always implies strength, and is much more preferable to sheer bulging over-muscledness.1 The body would function as an important site of British Communist Party (CPGB) efforts to implant the communist spirit and way of life in its members. During the interwar years the CPGB was keen to ensure the physical well-being and fitness of its activists. For the Party, healthy bodies enabled members to withstand better the attacks of rapacious
School-influenced work. Posthumanism, drawing again on complexity thinking, has developed its analysis of the operation of power through the notion of the fitness landscape. Essentially what this means is that power can be analysed through the capability of actors to affect the context within which other actors operate. We will also assess the contribution of Frankfurt School-influenced work by returning to the work of Adorno and Horkheimer, drawing on recent discussions of their work. Foucault and the intensification of power
the work of the Fatigue Laboratory and similar institutions, sports medicine in the USA could still be considered an ‘undignified’ activity even into the 1950s; much of the pressure to medicalise sport, or make it ‘scientific’, seemed to be coming from physical educators rather than doctors or physiologists. 13 Just like Britain, the USA did not get a formal organisation specifically for sports medicine (as opposed to physical fitness or physical education) until the 1950s. 14 The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) was founded in 1954, two years after BAS
influential in both radical and mainstream health movements. Regimen was integral to the agenda of various health and social reform groups including those interested in temperance. While some of these ideas were associated with radical agendas including anti-vaccination, others were integrated with more broadly based movements such as physical fitness. The twentieth century brought renewed interest in regimen from both orthodox and unorthodox practitioners, reflected in increased emphasis given to health promotion by public health professionals and the rise of naturopathy
fitness, and two describing jobs, typing and nursing. By contrast, the soft news content of the papers is determinedly connected with the Empire. The 1902 issue has a frontispiece of King Edward and Queen Alexandra, and a eulogistic article (pp. 89–90) on ‘A Maori Princess: Te Rangi Pai’, which urges upon readers the duty of reading about the Empire, since ‘Thoughtful girls cannot fail to feel an interest
about the ‘peace of God’ has little do with the promotion of ‘peace’ at all. Rather it is the fact that churchmen were able to begin to persuade the ruling classes to accept their dictates and thereby prove their fitness to exercise power. 21 The beginnings of this reconstruction of the laity can be seen when we look closely at the legislation of some of the councils. Although, as has been seen above, these councils were at first preoccupied with the reform of the moral and sexual behaviour of the clergy alone (apart, that is, from the injunctions to maintain peace
competitive trappings, seemed to necessitate something different: official national involvement in promoting spectator sport. This was particularly evident in the contentious discussions about the planned 100,000- person, thirty- million franc Olympic stadium, which proved divisive from the start. The stadium’s advocates argued that its construction would somehow spark a nationwide revival of French physical fitness, deemed critical in the wake of the First World War, while its detractors saw the Stade Olympique as an expensive space for parasitic mass spectatorship. Yet