Photographic archive provides glimpse of pre-nhs healthcare

A recently uncovered archive of photographs is giving people a glimpse into healthcare in the years just before the NHS was founded.

Some 4,050 photographs documenting healthcare in Britain between 1938 and 1943 were discovered by staff at heritage agency Historic England’s archive in Swindon.

They give a “striking” glimpse into wartime healthcare, in the years before the NHS was founded in 1948, from training nurses to treating adults and children, and the medical procedures and equipment in use at the time.

As well as showing burns treatments, blood transfusions, sterilising equipment and X-rays, the images also reveal health staff enjoying their time off, ice skating on a frozen tennis court and riding carousels.

And the typed descriptions that accompany the images, which record the date, location, and details of staff and equipment, give insights into the attitudes of the time.

The wording accompanying one image of an exercise class includes the lines: “Peckham mothers can keep that schoolgirl figure. The cares of housekeeping and raising a family can play havoc with a mother’s looks and bodily shapeliness.”

The photographs were taken by the Topical Press Agency, but how they ended up in the archive is a mystery, Historic England said.

The collection is being made accessible to the public for the first time to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the NHS, which came into being on July 5 1948.

PA. A nurse weighing a baby in Buckinghamshire in 1941.