ABSTRACT
Predating the wave of mass migration from Eastern Europe by almost a century, it first emerged in the Georgian period, when the Jewish poor were frequently associated with disreputable behaviour. The little-known Jewish Health Organisation of Great Britain (JHOGB) was also the outgrowth of 'native' Jewish anxiety about the Jewish poor. When the First World War broke out, Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, his health now restored, returned to medicine and served as a medical officer in the army, first in military hospitals in Britain, and then in Egypt and Palestine with one of the battalions of the Jewish Legion. Immediate and sustained exposure to East End conditions also convinced him of the inadequacy of the laissez-faire system and led him to abandon his family's political conservatism for an increasingly interventionist social liberalism. In addition to its preventive medicine programmes and its clinical work with disturbed children, the JHOGB sponsored research on physical and mental health and demographic profile of London Jews.
