Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best Loved Institution

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Dr Seaton will also appear on Radio 4’s ‘Start the Week’ on Monday 3 rd July speaking about the NHS for its 75 th anniversary (5 th July). From Clement Attlee to ‘Clap for Carers,’ this is a nuanced account of both the evolution of the NHS and the myth-making that came with it, as Seaton navigates the history of what is at once ‘Britain’s best-loved institution’ and a service perpetually seen to be in crisis. As part of the book’s conclusion, I also offered some reflections on what the history of the NHS might mean in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

On one hand, the service had survived and it was able to perform functions such as distributing vaccines with a high degree of public trust. The colour palette is less varied in Andrew Seaton’s Our NHS, which is a more academic, but still accessible survey of health service history. Both are nuanced in mapping the contours of a public response that shades between welcoming foreign doctors and nurses, wary acceptance and flagrant racism.If social democratic politics endured through the health service (which remained free-at-the-point-of-use, universal, mainly funded by taxation, and government-coordinated) then it lay fractured elsewhere.

He traces how the service has changed and adapted, bringing together the experiences of patients, staff from Britain and abroad, and the service's wider supporters and opponents. Environmental History and New Directions in Modern British Historiography', Twentieth Century British History 30, no. He is insightful on the ways that American conservatism, and its grotesque distortions of what state-funded medicine involves, have fed a British defensiveness that insulates the NHS from some of the more aggressive privatising impulses in the Tory party. A poll in May last year found the health service top of the list of things people thought were best about Britain, beating the nation’s countryside into second place. It is my hope that Our NHS can complement work currently being undertaken by other scholars that also illuminates the past of this world-famous institution, whether through smaller case studies or in macro terms.

He trained in both the UK and the USA, gaining a doctorate in History from New York University (NYU) in 2021.