Tag Archives: British National Health Service

Book review: Understanding the NHS

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Book cover of Understanding the NHS by Andy Stein, 2022. 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 […]

Medicine and cinema—A cultural symbiosis

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Fig 1. Poster for Chaplin film City Lights. 1931. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. 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 […]

The professor and the playwright on what it means to care

Fergus Shanahan Wilton, Cork, Ireland   ALLELUJAH! by Alan Bennett. Credit: Manuel Harlan / ArenaPAL (with permission). Sue Wallace as Hazel; Simon Williams as Ambrose; Rosie Ede as Mrs Earnshaw; Cleo Sylvester as Cora; Julia Foster as Mary; Louis Mahoney as Neville; Patricia England as Mavis; Colin Haigh as Arthur; Gwen Taylor as Lucille; Nicola […]

Trafford General Hospital: a conjuring of spatial significance

Sang Ik Song Limerick, Ireland    “Health Secretary Bevin with ‘First NHS Patient’ Sylvia Diggory in Trafford’s Park Hospital” 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 […]