The Gospel of Wealth and the National Health: The Rockefeller Foundation and Social Medicine in Britain's NHS, 1945-60', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94, no. Our NHSinsists that neither the institution’s acclaim nor its survival were automatic or pre-ordained. In Fighting for Life, Isabel Hardman arranges the history into 12 themes, defined as the “battles that made our NHS”. He is a historian of modern Britain, with particular interests in political history, social history, and the history of medicine and the environment.

Inspection copies are books under consideration as required or recommended reading for an upcoming course. We publish history, politics, current affairs, art, architecture, biography and pretty much everything else. The waiting list figures for treatment stood at their worst levels on record, strikes among health professionals unfolded across the service, and unknown numbers of NHS staff seemed to be emigrating for better conditions and pay overseas.In Fighting for Life , Hardman is less concerned with ideological frames and gloomier about the future. 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. That is only an option for those who can afford it, or rather, the few who can afford it plus increasing numbers who can’t but are driven by despair to incur the expense anyway. 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.

An engaging, inclusive history of the NHS, exploring its surprising survival-and the people who have kept it running In recent decades, a wave of appreciation for the NHS has swept across the UK. Our NHS is an engaging, inclusive history of the NHS, exploring its surprising survival and the people who have kept it running . I hope that my small contribution to telling the service’s history might provide us with another perspective when we think about its future.Next month, when Labour celebrates the anniversary of its proudest achievement it will do so, as usual, in opposition. 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’. 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.