10Things You Never Knew About the National Health Service

IT LOOKS AFTER US from cradle to grave, it employs a million people and it’s the envy of the world. It’s the National Health Service, and love it or hate it, it’s here to stay. For the time being at least. We’ve all used it, except people who can afford not to have to. But how much do we know about this gloriously benevolent institution? It’s time to go behind the screens, take all off our clothes and cough as we tell you…

1 HRH The Queen Mother famously objected to the setting up of the National Health Service. Indeed, in 1996, after choking on a fishbone halfway through a visit to Billingsgate Market to open a kipper splitting machine, she refused to be taken to the nearby NHS-run Mile End Hospital for treatment. Instead, market workers packed her into a fishbox full of ice and carried her on their heads 26 miles to Heathrow Airport, where she was placed on an RAF Nimrod and flown to Scotland. At Balmoral Castle, the Queen’s private surgeon Sir Gladstone Bagge performed a life-saving Heimlich manoeuvre on her majesty, after which she flew back to Billingsgate and completed the ceremony without a hitch. 2 THE NHS’s very first patient, who was waiting outside his local surgery in Lenton Lane, Nottingham, at 9am on July 5th 1948, was Dennis

Faraday, a 42-year-old painter and decorator. He told the receptionist that he had a funny pain in his shoulder and could the doctor put him on the panel for a couple of weeks until it cleared up. Two weeks later, he returned and complained that his other shoulder was giving him gyp now, and could the doctor put him on the panel for another fortnight. 3 THE tiniest ever NHS patient was the world’s smallest man Calvin

Phillips, who at the age of 53 was diagnosed with the world’s smallest underactive thyroid. The faulty gland, which was the size of a pinhead, was successfully treated with Levothyroxin tablets no bigger than a grain of sand to be taken every day before breakfast with a thimbleful of water. 4 IN the old days, NHS doctors could be easily recognised by their smart attire - shirt and tie with black trousers and shiny shoes for the men, knee-length black skirt with sensible blouse for the women - both topped off with a crisp, white labcoat with a stethoscope hanging out of the breast pocket. These days, medics look like they’ve just crawled out of fucking bed, as they wander about the wards wearing shapeless green or blue pyjamas and scruffy plastic clogs on their feet. 5 IT IS estimated that NHS surgeons remove enough pointless organs, including tonsils, appendixes and gallbladders, each year to fill Wembley Stadium three times over. Following operations, the excised bodyparts are carried out of the hospital and thrown in a skip three times the size of Wales. 6 MANY of the pivotal moments of our lives, from birth, to sickness to death, are played out in NHS hospitals every day. As such, they have provided a compelling backdrop for filmmakers wishing to explore complex existential issues such as the nature of relationships, the persistence of memory and the transitory nature of being. Carry On Doctor, Carry On Nurse, Carry On Matron and Carry On Again Doctor are just a few examples of this genre. 7 A SURPRISING number of comedians trained as doctors before beginning their showbiz careers. Madcap comic Harry Hill,

ex-Goodie Graeme Garden and late Python

Graham Chapman all studied medicine prior to shooting to TV fame. Between them, these funnymen shamefully managed to piss three quarters of a million pounds of taxpayers’ money spent training them up the wall. That’s enough to pay for fifteen kidney machines, eight heart transplants, or half a Christmas bonus for a senior management consultant employed by a Primary Healthcare Trust. 8 THE health service also offers many complementary forms of treatment, such as acupuncture, homoeopathy and herbal medicine. These are just like conventional medical therapies, except that they don’t work. 9 BACK in the 1970s, the NHS used to provide a range of shit glasses that allowed shortsighted children to be identified and bullied and school. Ironically, those same shit glasses are now eagerly sought by trendy hipsters trying to emulate their nerdy heroes, such as Morrissey, Jarvis Cocker and Elvis Costello, all of whom spent their formative years being called a mo and having their heads flushed down the toilet. 10 IN cartoons, doctors are often pictured wearing a reflective disc on a headband. But in real life noone has ever seen a doctor wearing such a thing, and when we rang the British Medical Association, nobody there was able to tell us what it might have been supposed to be.