Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best Loved Institution

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Anenurin Bevan, Minister of Health, on the first day of the NHS (5th July 1948) at Park Hospital, Davyhulme, via University of Liverpool. Environmental History and New Directions in Modern British Historiography', Twentieth Century British History 30, no. One of the things that kept me motivated to finish writing the book lay in how the service’s history allowed me to talk about lots of different things, from shifting meanings of class and gender, to Britain’s experience of Commonwealth immigration, to architectural aesthetics or debates in medical economics.

The book stitches together government reports with, for instance, photographs of patients in health centres, documentary films about U.The waiting list figures for treatment stood at their worst levels on record, strikes among health professionals unfolded across the service, and unknown numbers of NHS staff seemed to be emigrating for better conditions and pay overseas. Though I learned first-hand about the serious challenges facing the service from doctors and patients in my audiences as I spoke about the book after its publication, I also encountered public attachment to the NHS that reminded me why it had lasted through other periods of crisis. But idolatry doesn’t stop growing numbers of people turning to the private sector when they can’t get GP appointments or when the wait for operations is too long to bear.

I could gain some critical distance from the two predominant narratives about the service that circulated in the media and in everyday conversation: that it was a natural part of what made Britain special and/or that it stood on the precipice of collapse. Unfortunately we cannot offer a refund on custom prints unless they are faulty or we have made a mistake. In Fighting for Life, Isabel Hardman arranges the history into 12 themes, defined as the “battles that made our NHS”. Seaton] is insightful on the ways that American conservatism, and its grotesque distortions of what state-funded medicine involves, have fed a British defensiveness that insulates the NHS from some of the more aggressive privatising impulses in the Tory party.He is insightful on the ways that American conservatism, and its grotesque distortions of what state-funded medicine involves, have fed a British defensiveness that insulates the NHS from some of the more aggressive privatising impulses in the Tory party. Next month, when Labour celebrates the anniversary of its proudest achievement it will do so, as usual, in opposition. Through the perspectives of patients, medical practitioners, trade unions, overseas health experts, and assorted cultural figures, the book explains how the service became an integral part of British identity and why it survived the rise of neoliberalism.

I show that attitudes, culture, ideas, and activism also matter to the fate of welfare services, alongside administration or finances. It is my hope that Our NHS can complement work currently being undertaken by other scholars that also illuminates the past of this world-famous institution, whether through smaller case studies or in macro terms. Our NHSinsists that neither the institution’s acclaim nor its survival were automatic or pre-ordained.From the publisher: “In this wide-ranging history, Andrew Seaton examines the full story of the NHS.

The resultant danger is that “patients are starting to lose faith with it in an unprecedented way, too”. Seaton’s study is an important corrective to overarching accounts of the triumph of neoliberalism in Britain, a testament to the power of unintended consequences in policy-making, and a must-read about the strange survival of social democracy and everyday communalism into the twenty-first century. I hope that my small contribution to telling the service’s history might provide us with another perspective when we think about its future. My initial aspiration with the project was to illuminate the wider significance of the NHS in British life. An engaging, inclusive history of the NHS, exploring its surprising survival-and the people who have kept it running In recent decades, a wave of appreciation for the NHS has swept across the UK.Against the Sacred Cow': NHS Opposition and the Fellowship for Freedom in Medicine', Twentieth Century British History 26, no. He explains not only why it survived the neoliberalism of the late twentieth century but also how it became a key marker of national identity. As the government’s national archive for England, Wales and the United Kingdom, The National Archives hold over 1,000 years of the nation’s records for everyone to discover and use.