Fighting Fit: The Wartime Battle for Britain’s Health

There's a new book regarding wartime (WW2) Britain focusing on health. Author Laura Dawes finds that at the end of the war "infant mortality was lower than it had ever been (a long-term improvement continued, see figure below from http://ftp.iza.org/dp4932.pdf), deaths from child-killing diphtheria had fallen, better nutrition had seen rates of almost all infectious diseases drop, and mental health was sound."
How did that happen? Dawes attributes it to "the efforts of doctors, nurses, social workers, boy scouts, club women, first aiders, physiologists, tea ladies, Nobel Prize winners, air raid wardens, housewives, nutritionists, and psychologists."

Fighting Fit: The Wartime Battle for Britain's Health was published earlier this month by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Read a blog post by the author for the Wellcome Library here, a post on her own website here, and read the first few pages through Look Inside at amazon.co.uk. It does not appear to be available yet in Canada, not even on Kindle.