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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Steffan Blayney, "Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body" (Activist Studies of Science, 2022)
Description: Our guest today is Steffan Blayney, the author of Health & Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body. In Health & Efficiency, Blayney explores a new model of health that emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Centered on the working body, organized around the concept of efficiency, and grounded in scientific understandings of human labor, scientists, politicians, and capitalists of the era believed that national economic productivity could be maximized by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. At the core of this approach was the conviction that worker productivity was intimately connected to wor...