Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: British National Health Service

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…