Inspection copies are books under consideration as required or recommended reading for an upcoming course. In his even-handed analysis, Seaton argues that what is remarkable about the NHS is that it has, to all intents and purposes, survived ‘the tsunami of attempts to marketise’ it. As a first-generation university student from a low-income background, Andrew is an advocate of widening access to education, and has volunteered with programming to encourage students from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue higher education. The book stitches together government reports with, for instance, photographs of patients in health centres, documentary films about U. 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.

Our NHSinsists that neither the institution’s acclaim nor its survival were automatic or pre-ordained. 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. Both books describe party political wrangling without overt partisanship, although Seaton’s leftward tilt becomes increasingly clear in later chapters. In Fighting for Life , Hardman is less concerned with ideological frames and gloomier about the future.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. At the next general election, Keir Starmer will, as usual, warn the country not to trust the Tories with the NHS.

He is a historian of modern Britain, with particular interests in political history, social history, and the history of medicine and the environment. The Tories were notionally on board for some kind of nationwide healthcare expansion, but not on the scale or in the form that Nye Bevan, health secretary in Britain’s postwar Labour government, brought to the Commons. Hardman describes how the problems inflicted on the health service by the pandemic – trauma for staff equivalent to wartime; colossal expense; disruption of systems and cancellation of routine procedures – are unrelenting and existential.Our NHSwas published in the summer of 2023, during a period of serious concern for the health service. 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. Our NHS has received positive coverage in The Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Lancet, and The Literary Review. Free-market medicine was daubed with the Stars and Stripes,” he observes, “which could not compete with the Union Jack draped over the NHS. My initial aspiration with the project was to illuminate the wider significance of the NHS in British life.

Yet its success was hardly guaranteed, as Andrew Seaton makes clear in this elegantly written, highly original history of an institution that survived numerous crises to become a model for the democratic welfare state and the very antithesis of the health inequities we face today as Americans.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. 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.