Tag: British National Health Service
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Book review: Understanding the NHS
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The National Health Service in the United Kingdom was founded in 1948 by Aneurin Bevan, a Welsh Labour Party politician and health minister in Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government. Bevan was a coal miner before entering Parliament in 1928. He had long campaigned for a free health service for all…
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Medicine and cinema—A cultural symbiosis
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom For doctors and lovers of cinema, 1895 was an important year. On November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen, a fifty-year-old professor of physics, discovered X-rays in his laboratory in Wurzburg, Germany. On March 22 1895, the Lumiere brothers presented the first film on a screen to an audience of 200 in…
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The professor and the playwright on what it means to care
Fergus ShanahanWilton, Cork, Ireland Illness words are seldom simple. They can hurt or heal in different contexts or change their meaning over time. Nor are they always understood the same way by patients and doctors. Borrowing from Philip Larkin, it is “difficult to find words at once true and kind, or not untrue and not…
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Trafford General Hospital: A conjuring of spatial significance
Sang Ik SongLimerick, Ireland On July 5, 1948, the then health secretary Aneurin Bevan officially launched the British National Health Service (NHS) at Trafford’s Park Hospital.1 The picture of Nye Bevan, suited and clean cut by the bedside of Sylvia Diggory, the first NHS patient, stands iconic in the heralding of a new age of…