The focus on the state of the NHS in recent years has tended to create demands for improvement, sometimes without stating what we want improvements on. Not often do we hear about how the service coped in other times. Yet ever since the Beveridge Report was implemented in 1948, there have been incessant arguments about how best to change the NHS.

Aneurin Bevan the Labour Minister was responsible for setting up the NHS and gained universal recognition for it. Iain Macleod the Tory MP said in Parliament in March 1952 “To have a debate on the NHS without the Right Honourable Gentleman (Bevan) would be like putting on Hamlet with no one in the part of first grave digger”. Opposition to the birth of the NHS came not just from diehards but many in the medical profession, and not only right wingers.

Babyboomers are not quite old enough to remember what health services were like prior to the NHS. Visits and treatment as well as medicines had to be paid for on the spot. At first all services were free but within 3 years prescription charges were brought in to help alleviate a financial crisis. (We know about crisis in the NHS today too). The Wilson government tried to end prescription charges but they came back again. In 1951 Bevan resigned over a government decision to introduce dental and spectacles charging. They were introduced because of the unpredicted level of costs of the health service. Bevan argued that demand would reduce once the backlog of illness and disease, untreated previously because many people could not afford to pay a doctor, had been attended to. Looking at the history of the NHS reminds one of the similarities of its problems of today. If you want to read more try one of these:

Waller Maureen: London 1945 Life in the Debris of War: John Murray 2004.
Jay Anthony: The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations: OUP 2003.
Garfield S. Our Hidden Lives: Ebury Press 2004.
Hennessy Peter: Never Again: Britain 1945-51: Cape 1992. Plus pp218-221 "Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties" Allen Lane 2006.

Gilbert Martin: The Day The War Ended: Harpercollins 1995.

For an amusing and informative history of health and medicine in rural England at the start of the 20th century, find a copy of Bishop Dr RWS: My Moorland Patients: John Murray 1922 (reprinted several times). Republished in the 1970s as Moorland Doctor.