Caring for weary and wounded soldiers in World War I, Jeffrey Reznick suggests in the opening sections of his book, provided not only physical healing for those who had served Britain at the front but also an opportunity for the national psyche to heal its own war wounds through public expressions of nurturing and reaffirmations of patriotism. Through a cultural history investigating specific sites of such healing, such as the rest hut, the military hospital, and the rehabilitative institution, he looks both to the institutional understanding of caregiving and to the individual voices of soldiers recounting their experiences, with particular attention to some of the tensions that emerged between these two. The result is a persuasive and readable account of the linked histories of nation and body during the Great War.

The first two-thirds of his book focuses on the primary institutions devoted to caregiving. For uninjured soldiers who sought a mere respite from the front, voluntary aid organizations such as the Young Men's Christian Assocation (YMCA), Salvation Army, and the Church Army established the rest hut. While the hut's leisure activities and domestic settings re-created some of the comforts of home, as Healing the Nation points out, it also helped reinforce domestic ideals of morality and masculinity—the YMCA by providing the body with wholesome recreations and sports, the Church Army by encouraging spiritual activity. The architecture and official accounts of military hospitals for the wounded likewise reflected the period's ideologies of hygiene and health care. Thorough and informative in reviewing these official aims, Reznick's discussion becomes most compelling when it demonstrates how those institutional efforts at self-representation were complicated by competing discourses. The rest hut, for example, might have likened itself to church and home, but it also functioned as a site of consumerism and economic exchange and thus opened itself to accusations of competing with the more traditional, for-profit canteen. In similar fashion, an official postcard image showed one military hospital as an almost idyllic space of restful recovery, with wide-open windows facing onto a lush English garden, while the soldiers’ perspectives often suggested a very different experience. Here Reznick examines a wealth of material from the period's hospital magazines, which relied largely on contributions of artwork, poetry, and reflective pieces from soldiers, and while censored by hospital authorities, the contents reveal that patients commonly regarded the hospital experience as a mere extension of military discipline and war's dehumanization. Indeed, one soldier complains that his bedsheets, folded with military rigor by an unsympathetic nurse, imprison him; in other cases, rhymes lambaste unappetizing meals, or cartoons depict recovering soldiers as passive components within an elaborate, impersonal machine. The rift that emerged between soldiers, on the one hand, and institutional authorities, caregivers, and a sometimes insensitive public, on the other, Reznick argues, helped foster a sense of camaraderie based on common experiences among the former.

The final sections of Healing the Nation examine two of the official mechanisms designed to ease the recovering soldier's transition into a position of respectable masculinity within everyday civilian life. The blue uniform worn by the convalescent soldier gave the public a legible sign of his status, while the rehabilitation of the injured soldier helped frame him as a productive worker making another kind of contribution to the nation's war effort. Intended as a mark of honor and patriotism, to some the blue suit seemed instead to undermine the wearer's dignity. As the economics of its production resulted in a conspicuously poor fit, for example, the uniform became rather a mark of the soldier's lack of social status, as he suffered the embarrassment of cheap cloth and a cuffed pant leg. For disabled soldiers, the rehabilitation center at Shepherd's Bush Military Hospital, tellingly situated at Hammersmith Workhouse Infirmary in London, offered a similarly humiliating experience; though designed to help the war's wounded function again within a productive economy by training them to produce medical supplies and prosthetics, soldiers there often regarded the rehabilitation center as an extension of the workhouse. Moreover, as Reznick points out, in spite of this attempt to help soldiers claim or reclaim a masculine authority associated with economic independence, many found themselves unemployed after the war.

Healing the Nation's relatively slim size belies the impressive range of source material, including postcards, photographs, and soldiers’ journals and drawings, that contribute to this nuanced and multifaceted account of the soldiers’ experience of the liminal zone between the front and civilian society. These varied perspectives help illuminate the uncertainties—institutional, popular, and individual—involved in defining the soldier's place, and they provide ample evidence of what the author calls the “crisis of masculinity” (10) that the figure of the suffering or wounded soldier represented during wartime. It is in its treatment of this latter question and, in particular, of the ways in which the culture of the Great War had a more general impact on conceptions of masculinity and the male body, that Reznick's book is at once most deeply suggestive yet also open-ended. For example, his discussion in chapter 4 identifies evidence for a camaraderie among soldiers in the hospital magazines; however, its emphasis is on the negative or reactive bases for that bond, on the shared ways in which soldiers rejected or were critical of the institutional ideals imposed on them. But that camaraderie suggests that the culture of the hut and hospital was productive of some positively defined ideals as well, alternate understandings of manhood or masculine roles into which these sources might provide some insight. What were the gender implications of this dissonance beyond the temporary environment of the caregiving institution, and what role might the contested figure of the recovering soldier, at once passive and active, victim and hero, have played in reshaping conceptions of masculinity more generally, both during the war and later? Reznick rightly situates his research in relation to the numerous other histories that intersect with it, such as military history, medical history, and gender history, and his book invites such ambitious and reaching questions about the broader implications of these institutional and individual accounts, precisely because it shows us the relevance of an inquiry into wartime caregiving to the other cultural histories perhaps more familiar to us.