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

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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. If social democratic politics endured through the health service (which remained free-at-the-point-of-use, universal, mainly funded by taxation, and government-coordinated) then it lay fractured elsewhere.

Although these interpretations still carried some weight in my thinking, I tried to not let them determine my analysis. This fractures the moral foundations of a service that embedded itself so deeply and so quickly in popular affections precisely because it banished the fear of ill health that a billing service imposed. Our NHSinsists that neither the institution’s acclaim nor its survival were automatic or pre-ordained.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.

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). On one hand, the service had survived and it was able to perform functions such as distributing vaccines with a high degree of public trust. By highlighting these dynamics, I build on insights from prior historical scholarship (often informed by social science) that explained the resilience of welfare states through structural factors like the advantages of pooling risks or the power of ‘path dependence’ in social policy. In Fighting for Life , Hardman is less concerned with ideological frames and gloomier about the future.

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.

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. 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.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. 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 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. 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. Instead, the book shows the active work that was required to embed and adapt the service to social change, outmanoeuvre free-market critics, and associated the institution with Britishness itself.

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.Anenurin Bevan, Minister of Health, on the first day of the NHS (5th July 1948) at Park Hospital, Davyhulme, via University of Liverpool. 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.

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