Making invalidity fair: schizophrenia, medical uncertainty and the certification of war disability pensions in post-war Britain

Abstract In post-war Britain there was cross-party political pressure to ensure that disabled veterans received fair compensation. This produced a particular challenge to the state’s deployment of psychiatric knowledge. In 1943 new laws governing the pension appeal tribunals were passed to give veterans the benefit of the doubt in their appeals, throwing the spotlight on diseases considered by psychiatrists to have hereditary aetiologies, such as schizophrenia. This paper reconstructs the medico-legal history of schizophrenia appeal cases to better understand both how the pursuit of judicial procedure interacted with medical uncertainty and how post-war sympathies for veterans helped to normalize schizophrenia in public life. Making invalidity fair meant ensuring that the government was held to the standards of legal procedure in its award of war disability pensions. Moreover, in the case of schizophrenia, it also meant using legal means to force the psychiatric profession to be more honest about the limits of its disease theories. The interaction of medical and legal epistemic practices produced a hybrid entity, stress-triggered schizophrenia, as a socially acceptable solution to the problem of medical uncertainty.