Abstract
As the initial enthusiasm for social security waned, the NHS quickly became, as it was to remain thereafter, the most popular welfare service. Within three months of its establishment it was being hailed in a Gallup poll as the greatest achievement of the Labour government; and later opinion polls rarely recorded levels of support below 80 per cent. Indeed, so dominant a position did the NHS come to command in popular perceptions of the welfare state that the two terms were commonly regarded as synonymous.1
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Further Reading
The NHS is well served by introductory texts. Among the best are R. Klein, The Politics of the National Health Service (1983)
and B. Watkin, The National Health Service: the first phase, 1948–74 and after (1978). Both contain good bibliographies and can be supplemented by the well-documented official history, C. Webster, The Health Services Since the War, the first volume of which was published in 1988.
D.M. Fox provides useful comparisons in Health Policies, Health Politics: the British and American Experience, 1911–1965 (Princeton, 1986).
Two brief insights into the history of GPs and health centres can be found in F. Honigsbaum, The Division of British Medicine (1979)
and P. Hall, ‘The development of health centres’ in P. Hall et al., Change, Choice and Conflict in Social Policy (1975).
C. Ham, Health Policy in Britain (1982) identifies the main theoretical approaches to the history of the NHS.
The origins of the NHS have attracted much attention. In addition to the texts cited above, H. Eckstein, The English Health Service (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1958) presents an American perspective,
whilst insider accounts are J. E. Pater, The Making of the National Health Service (1981) and more briefly,
but with equal illumination, P. Benner, ‘The early years of the National Health Service’, in T. Gorst et al., Postwar Britain (1989). The various interpretations are dissected in C. Webster, ‘Conflict and consensus: explaining the British Health Service’, Twentieth Century British History 1 (1990) 115–51. The political battle over the early financing of the NHS is recorded in M. Foot, Aneurin Bevan, vol. 2 (1973)
and, rather more reliably, in P. M. Williams, Hugh Gaitskell (1979).
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© 1993 Rodney Lowe
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Lowe, R. (1993). Health Care. In: The Welfare State in Britain since 1945. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22549-1_7
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