1947

Creation of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), a continuation of the Emergency Hospital (later Medical) Service of 1939 that brought the nation’s hospital services – voluntary, municipal, and Poor Law – under state control. It was “driven primarily by a concern to promote national efficiency and competitiveness by providing a system of mass health care. With the creation of the NHS these values came also to dominate what had previously been the elite voluntary hospitals, while the interests of private doctors were relegated to a distinctly inferior, if still potent, place in the organization of health care. . . individualized forms of medical practice were to a large extent displace by teamwork and managerialism in hospital medicine, and by standardization and routinization in general practice” (Sturdy & Cooter, 15, 16). It included a Social Medicine Research Unit that was influenced by Major Jerry Morris’s handbook Unless We Plan Now: Health, which he published from India in 1944, and focused on infant mortality, coronary heart disease, and the provision of health services (J. Daly, 145).