Posters, Protests, and Prescriptions : Cultural Histories of the National Health Service in Britain

The National Health Service (NHS) officially ‘opened’ across Britain in 1948. It replaced a patchy system of charity and local providers, and made healthcare free at the point of use. Over the subsequent decades, the NHS was vested with cultural meaning, and even love. By 1992, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson declared that the service was ‘the closest thing the English have to a religion’. Yet in 2016, a physician publishing in the British Medical Journal asked whether the service was, in fact, a ‘national religion or national football’, referring to the complex politics of healthcare. Placards, posters, and prescriptions radically illuminates the multiple meanings of the NHS, in public life and culture, over its seventy years of life. The book charts how this institution has been ignored, worshipped, challenged, and seen as under threat throughout its history. It analyses changing cultural representations and patterns of public behaviour that have emerged, and the politics and everyday life of health. By looking at the NHS through the lenses of labour, activism, consumerism, space, and representation, this collection showcases the depth and potential of cultural history. This approach can explain how and why the NHS has become the defining institution of contemporary Britain. Front Matter Contents List of figures List of tables Notes on contributors Acknowledgement Introduction Part I: Work The making of ‘NHS staff’ as a worker identity, 1948–85 Sick notes are a waste of time: doctors’ labour and medical certification at the birth of the National Health Service Part II: Activism ‘Loving’ the National Health Service: social surveys and activist feelings The everyday work of hospital campaigns: public knowledge and activism in the UK’s national health services Part III: Consumerism Consuming health? Health education and the British public in the 1980s Customers who don’t buy anything! The introduction of free dispensing at Boots the Chemists Part IV: Space The cultural significance of space and place in the National Health Service ‘Bright-while-you-wait’? Waiting rooms and the National Health Service, c. 1948–58 Part V: Representation Representation of the National Health Service in the arts and popular culture ‘If it hadn’t been for the doctor, I think I would have killed myself’: ensuring adolescent knowledge and access to healthcare in the age of Gillick Part VI: International ‘A spawning of the nether pit’? Welfare, warfare, and American visions of Britain’s National Health Service, 1948–58 Epilogue: ‘I’m afraid[,] there’s no NHS’ Select bibliography Index The National Health Service has provided Britain's healthcare since 1948. This institution has been the subject of tense political debate since its inception and has undergone a number of complex reforms and restructures. But the meanings of the NHS are not only – or even primarily – lived out in politics. Nearly every Briton comes into contact with the NHS – from cradle to grave – and this system of healthcare shapes society, culture and everyday life. This book charts these multiple meanings, looking at the NHS as a site of work, activism and consumerism, as a space and in cultural representations. Looking in these ways, the book shows how and why the NHS has become a symbol of Britishness and an object of fierce protectiveness, even love, today. The National Health Service determines how Britons receive healthcare. It is a source of national pride, a workplace and a symbol. This book explores how the cultural meanings of the NHS developed and changed since its foundation in 1948, shaped by activism, labour, consumerism, space and representation. -- .