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

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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. With an appreciation of the motives of those who have attacked its founding principles, to penetrating analysis of its resilience, this book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the history of our NHS.

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. As a first-generation university student from a low-income background, Andrew is an advocate of widening access to education, and has volunteered with programming to encourage students from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue higher education.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. Free-market medicine was daubed with the Stars and Stripes,” he observes, “which could not compete with the Union Jack draped over the NHS. I show that attitudes, culture, ideas, and activism also matter to the fate of welfare services, alongside administration or finances. Both books describe party political wrangling without overt partisanship, although Seaton’s leftward tilt becomes increasingly clear in later chapters.

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. 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. Hardman describes how the problems inflicted on the health service by the pandemic – trauma for staff equivalent to wartime; colossal expense; disruption of systems and cancellation of routine procedures – are unrelenting and existential. The colour palette is less varied in Andrew Seaton’s Our NHS, which is a more academic, but still accessible survey of health service history. In Fighting for Life, Isabel Hardman arranges the history into 12 themes, defined as the “battles that made our NHS”.He is a historian of modern Britain, with particular interests in political history, social history, and the history of medicine and the environment. This work is a wide-ranging history of the British coal industry in the twentieth century, exploring its legacies on human health, pollution, decolonisation, political economy, and environmentalism. He traces how the service has changed and adapted, bringing together the experiences of patients, staff from Britain and abroad, and the service’s wider supporters and opponents. We publish history, politics, current affairs, art, architecture, biography and pretty much everything else. 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.