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

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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. We publish history, politics, current affairs, art, architecture, biography and pretty much everything else. 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. Unfortunately we cannot offer a refund on custom prints unless they are faulty or we have made a mistake.

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. 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.Seaton’s] analysis is sharp and compelling and makes a considerable contribution to the scholarship surrounding what he terms ‘Britain’s best-loved institution. 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. 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.

He trained in both the UK and the USA, gaining a doctorate in History from New York University (NYU) in 2021. In Our NHS, Andrew Seaton explores how the National Health Service, a great achievement for Aneurin Bevan and the left, became a national institution commanding widespread support.How Britain fell in love with socialised medicine, and whether the relationship can endure, is the subject of two books published to coincide with the service’s 75th birthday. 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. He is a historian of modern Britain, with particular interests in political history, social history, and the history of medicine and the environment. Our NHSinsists that neither the institution’s acclaim nor its survival were automatic or pre-ordained. 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.

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. 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.I hope that my small contribution to telling the service’s history might provide us with another perspective when we think about its future. It might be vulnerable to spoilage and neglect, but no one imagines it could be erased and no politician who wants to get elected will be caught suggesting such a thing.

Inspection copies are books under consideration as required or recommended reading for an upcoming course. In Fighting for Life , Hardman is less concerned with ideological frames and gloomier about the future.

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. The resultant danger is that “patients are starting to lose faith with it in an unprecedented way, too”. 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. 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. The book stitches together government reports with, for instance, photographs of patients in health centres, documentary films about U.