I was born in London in 1927.
As I write this in March 2007 I have reached 80 active and in fair health.
My childhood experiences of medical care, of which this picture
is an example, may have helped to make me think about changing it.
I entered Cambridge University in 1947, one year before birth of the
British National Health Service (NHS). For its designer,
Health and Housing Minister Aneurin Bevan, it was a first major
experiment in democratic socialism. Despite many limitations,
so it has proved. Until the late 1980s, the NHS was essentially a gift
economy devoted to needs, not profits – a socialist idea. For patients,
and for all NHS staff except the doctors, he left democracy to be fought
for by later generations, not from choice, but necessity: doctors then
were still mostly obstacles rather than contributors to social progress.
The NHS is probably immortal, not as a brand name which opportunist
politicians can abdicate to business, but as a set of liberating ideas and
practice which have transformed British medicine in my lifetime, and
the attitudes of most doctors to their social role. Progress will resume
when health workers learn that understanding the anatomy and
physiology of evolving society is as essential to professional
competence as physiology or anatomy of the human body.