Top Highlights

• Isolation hospitals were built for paupers with smallpox, and others for those suffering from scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid, typhus, measles, whooping cough, cholera and dysentery.
• National Health Insurance Act 1911 (NHI), which created a limited form of health insurance, albeit restricted to lower paid workers, and as Aneurin Bevan was later to say, was where the future Health Service Act began.
• A countrywide Gallup Poll, taken the week after the publication of William Beveridge’s report, found that although the vast majority of the public favoured the proposed health scheme, doctors most certainly did not.
• The British Medical Association (BMA) launched a vigorous campaign against the terms on offer in 1946, with the secretary, Dr Charles Hill (well known as the BBC’s ‘Radio Doctor’) declaring, ‘Let us make sure your doctor does not become the State’s doctor.’ However, Bevan eventually bought the support of the reluctant doctors by, as he put it, ‘stu...
• Everyone – rich or poor, man, woman or child – can use it or any part of it. There are no charges, except for a few special items. There are no insurance qualifications. But it is not a ‘charity’. You are all paying for it, mainly as taxpayers, and it will relieve your money worries in time of illness.