Giving Britain a clean bill of HEALTH
The health of the nation changed forever 70 years ago with the birth of the National Health Service. MARION McMULLEN checks out some of the medical milestones
IT WAS free glasses, teeth and wigs when the National Health Service began 70 years ago.
Health secretary Aneurin Bevan declared: “No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.”
The Labour MP was a driving force behind the new NHS and officially launched the pioneering new venture at the old Park Hospital in Manchester on July 5, 1948.
There had been opposition along the way and threatened strikes by some GPs concerned about what they saw as government interference with their medical practices.
Winston Churchill mockingly called Aneurin Bevan “the Minister of Disease,” but the Welsh-born politician was determined to bring free medical care to a country still recovering from the Second World War.
Bevan spoke in Manchester the day before the official launch of the NHS saying: “The eyes of the world are turning to Great Britain. We now have the moral leadership of the world and before many years we shall have people coming here as to a modern Mecca, learning from us in the twentieth century as they learned from us in the seventeenth century.”
He later met the first NHS patient to receive hospital treatment – 13-year-old Sylvia Beckingham who was admitted with a liver condition. He visited her at her hospital bedside, but she later admitted she had been too shy to ask him any questions.
Nurses from six nationalities began training at the Central Preliminary Training School in Hadley Common in Hertfordshire in February 1948 to prepare to work in the hospitals being taken over by the new NHS. Their training covered everything from basic bandaging to learning how to administer oxygen to patients.
Prescription charges of one shilling (5p) were introduced in 1952 to cut rising costs with dental treatment costing a pound.
Ten years after the birth of the NHS an ambitious scheme was launched to protect youngsters against polio and diphtheria.
It was the first mass vaccination programme in the country and the jab was offered to the under 15s. Before the programme, reported cases of polio were as high as 8,000 a year and with cases of diphtheria
– a contagious bacterial respiratory infection – reaching 70,000, leading to 5,000 deaths a year.
More medical milestones were reached in 1960 with the first successful kidney transplant being carried out in the UK by Edinburgh doctor Michael Woodruff on a set of 49-year-old identical twins and the first full hip replacement being carried out by Professor John Charnley in Wrightington Hospital.
He would often ask patients if they could give the hips back after their deaths so he and his team could check for wear and tear and improve on the design.
The contraceptive pill became available in 1961 although it was initially only available to married women. However, the swinging sixties soon changed all that, and by
1967 it was available to women across the country who wanted to take charge of their own birth control.
A team of 18 doctors and nurses conducted the first heart transplant in the UK in 1968, but unfortunately the patient, 45-year-old Frederick West, died 46 days after the operation from infection. The donor heart came from 26-yearold labourer Patrick Ryan.
Louise Brown made history in 1978 as the world’s first test tube baby. She was born by caesarean section at Oldham District General Hospital and weighed in at 5lb 12oz. The new IVF (in-vitro fertilization) technique that led to her birth was developed by gynaecologist Dr Patrick Steptoe and
Dr Robert
Edwards, a physiologist at Cambridge University.
Dr Edwards was awarded the
Nobel medicine prize in 2010 and the Nobel jury said. “His contributions represent a milestone in the development of modern medicine.” Breast cancer screening was launched in 1988 to help cut the number of cancer deaths in women over 50 and in 1994 the NHS organ donor register was launched following a five-year campaign by John and Rosemary Cox. Their five-year-old son Peter died in 1989 from a brain tumour and had asked for his organs to be used to help others.
The UK’s first hand transplant was carried out in 2013 when a surgical team at Leeds General Infirmary operated on 51-year-old former pub landlord Mark Cahill for eight hours to give him a transplanted donor hand. He had been unable to use his right hand after being affected by gout.
The NHS is facing new challenges, but medical advances, treatments and groundbreaking operations continue to change the nation’s health.
As for what the next 70 years hold, Aneurin Bevan himself once said: “The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it.”