Introduction

The Second World War arguably marked an important watershed in approaches towards the care of sick and disabled children in Great Britain. While wartime conditions could, deliberately or otherwise, permit the neglect and mistreatment of some vulnerable groups children were the intended beneficiaries of carefully expanded statutory and voluntary sector health and welfare provision. Such services tended to be framed more by a concern about the health of the nation and its future citizens than close attention to individual needs but they nevertheless were used by large numbers of children. Thus the Second World War, like earlier twentieth-century conflicts, encouraged investment in new facilities for diagnosing and treating children who either had, or were at risk of developing, a disabling condition. To an extent such specialist services were subsumed into the wider development of the welfare state after 1945 and have perhaps received less attention from historians than either the school medical services that emerged after the Boer War, or the maternity and child welfare provision established after 1918. They merit a closer look however because although it is certainly true that many of the post-1945 services had their origins, or at least inspiration, in pre-1939 provision the war years encouraged an important change of emphasis as well as an expansion of the scale and scope of provision.