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

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Fluidly written, richly detailed and frequently surprising, Our NHS is the portrait of a social democratic institution that withstood the assaults of neoliberalism, battle-scarred and transformed but still very much alive. At the next general election, Keir Starmer will, as usual, warn the country not to trust the Tories with the NHS. A poll in May last year found the health service top of the list of things people thought were best about Britain, beating the nation’s countryside into second place. The two authors are aligned in their analysis, covering much of the same material and identifying many of the same recurrent patterns: the constant pressure for innovation provoking fear of core NHS principles being abandoned; tension between a consumer culture that increasingly expects customised choice and a system that functions by pooling resources on a principle of collective solidarity; the challenge of imposing minimum standards without the perverse, unintended consequences that rigid targets generate; the simple fact that there is never enough money, but also that more cash is not always the answer and Treasury pockets are not infinitely deep. Nonetheless, the NHS also received an enormous amount of celebration – including, a service in Westminster Abbey, an NHS ‘Big Tea’ occurring in different parts of the U.

Against the Sacred Cow': NHS Opposition and the Fellowship for Freedom in Medicine', Twentieth Century British History 26, no. Andrew's first book, Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best-Loved Institution (Yale University Press 2023) is an expansive history of a world-famous universal health care system. That is only an option for those who can afford it, or rather, the few who can afford it plus increasing numbers who can’t but are driven by despair to incur the expense anyway. Rishi Sunak, knowing how that charge resonates with voters, will swear allegiance to state-run, collectivised healthcare although it is an affront to many of his party’s sacred beliefs. Among Yale’s titles in British history, Deborah Cohen’s Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (2006) , Edmond Smith’s Merchants: The Community That Shaped England’s Trade and Empire (2021), and Sasha Handley’s, Sleep in Early Modern England (2016) all provided examples of how to achieve such a balance.To celebrate, we have selected 50 important Yale London books from our past, present and future to tell the story of our publishing through a series of articles and extracts. The country that led global trends in privatisation of state assets and whose most electorally successful party makes a fetish of free-market enterprise finds itself also home to one of the world’s most popular and durable socialist institutions. My initial aspiration with the project was to illuminate the wider significance of the NHS in British life. Anenurin Bevan, Minister of Health, on the first day of the NHS (5th July 1948) at Park Hospital, Davyhulme, via University of Liverpool.

Andrew Seaton’s book was first published in the summer of 2023, coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the founding of the NHS. Seaton’s] analysis is sharp and compelling and makes a considerable contribution to the scholarship surrounding what he terms ‘Britain’s best-loved institution. As the popular celebration of the service’s ‘birthday’ in recent years shows, it is far more than just a health system. 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. The Gospel of Wealth and the National Health: The Rockefeller Foundation and Social Medicine in Britain's NHS, 1945-60', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94, no.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. The resultant danger is that “patients are starting to lose faith with it in an unprecedented way, too”. 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.

Free-market medicine was daubed with the Stars and Stripes,” he observes, “which could not compete with the Union Jack draped over the NHS. Our NHS has received positive coverage in The Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Lancet, and The Literary Review. Second, why did the institution survive to achieve such significance, given that many other parts of the welfare state or public industries also founded in the mid-twentieth century became residualised or privatised? Battles fought on that front – for safe maternity care; for reproductive rights – provide some of the most compelling passages in Hardman’s deftly constructed and powerfully told narrative. Seaton emphasizes the resilience of the NHS-perpetually "in crisis" and yet perennially enduring-as well as the political values it embodies and the work of those who have tirelessly kept it afloat.Yale University Press seemed the perfect fit in this regard, allowing for ample space for both the things that academics tend to care about (references and scholarly debates) and the things that the general public prioritise (accessible prose and human stories). 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. 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. Dr Seaton will also appear on Radio 4’s ‘Start the Week’ on Monday 3 rd July speaking about the NHS for its 75 th anniversary (5 th July).

Yet its success was hardly guaranteed, as Andrew Seaton makes clear in this elegantly written, highly original history of an institution that survived numerous crises to become a model for the democratic welfare state and the very antithesis of the health inequities we face today as Americans. Britons have clapped for frontline workers and championed the service as a distinctive national achievement. He and Hardman are in agreement on the vital role that immigration has played in keeping the health service functioning. It was done with astonishing speed in the face of financial constraint, resistance from much of the medical establishment and the Conservative party. A rising tide of liberalising capitalism has sluiced the NHS but somehow not dissolved its collectivist foundations.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. That makes it a miraculous bastion or an infuriating relic depending on which end of the ideological spectrum you ask. The Tories were notionally on board for some kind of nationwide healthcare expansion, but not on the scale or in the form that Nye Bevan, health secretary in Britain’s postwar Labour government, brought to the Commons. From the publisher: “In this wide-ranging history, Andrew Seaton examines the full story of the NHS. An expert in the history of modern Britain and the NHS, he received his PhD in history from New York University in 2021.