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

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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. 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. Environmental History and New Directions in Modern British Historiography', Twentieth Century British History 30, no. A rising tide of liberalising capitalism has sluiced the NHS but somehow not dissolved its collectivist foundations.

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. Our NHSinsists that neither the institution’s acclaim nor its survival were automatic or pre-ordained. 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.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. 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. Fast-forward 75 years and we reach the 12th of Hardman’s battles – the struggle, on multiple fronts, to protect Britain from the ravages of Covid, which also became a struggle to protect the NHS itself from falling apart under the strain. He and Hardman are in agreement on the vital role that immigration has played in keeping the health service functioning.

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. We publish history, politics, current affairs, art, architecture, biography and pretty much everything else. 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). After all, it was not inevitable at the service’s inception in 1948 that it would one day regularly top opinion polls of what made people ‘most proud to be British’.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. 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.

He is a historian of modern Britain, with particular interests in political history, social history, and the history of medicine and the environment.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. Though the full ramifications are still being uncovered, I argued that the pandemic revealed both the strengths and the limitations of the NHS. From the publisher: “In this wide-ranging history, Andrew Seaton examines the full story of the NHS. I show that attitudes, culture, ideas, and activism also matter to the fate of welfare services, alongside administration or finances. As the popular celebration of the service’s ‘birthday’ in recent years shows, it is far more than just a health system.