ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the representations of the public produced by one of Britain’s major disease charities, the Empire Rheumatism Council, founded in 1936. Disease campaigns were central to twentieth-century medicine. Crusades against cancer, tuberculosis, polio, venereal disease, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, arthritis, asthma and other conditions raised huge sums for research, treatment and health education. The creation of the National Health Service in the 1940s began to undermine the centrality of elite private practice to medicine. It also began to undermine industrialists’ support for medical charity, and with it the idea that the success of ‘public appeals’ depended on the ‘big money’ donor. ‘The public’ was always constructed in relation to something else, and shared many of the same characteristics as ‘the masses’ and ‘the crowd’, though rarely the physical threat; related notions such as the ‘public mind’ or ‘public opinion’ referred to the nebulous world of perception or mentality more than the physical reality of the crowd.
