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

Product Information

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. Instead, I sought to remain attentive to the alternative roads that the service might have gone down. 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. The wide lens and varied material that underpins the book allowed me to answer two central questions. That is especially true for women and children, who had previously depended on the indulgence of husbands and fathers for access to medicine.

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. Seaton emphasizes the resilience of the NHS-perpetually "in crisis" and yet perennially enduring-as well as the political values it embodies and the work of those who have tirelessly kept it afloat. 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.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.

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.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. The resultant danger is that “patients are starting to lose faith with it in an unprecedented way, too”. 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. I show that attitudes, culture, ideas, and activism also matter to the fate of welfare services, alongside administration or finances.