Ethical beliefs attacked

✒ BECAUSE I was an adult before the NHS was established against huge opposition from newspaper owners and Tory MPs, I could offer a personal view of medical practice during the Depression. My younger brother suffered badly from asthma, but my frantic mother could not afford to pay a doctor, so frequently, as an ignorant child, I guessed that he would be dead by the morning, gasping for the breath of life. He did breathe vapour with Friars Balsam, which may have been effective, before he was 16 when the NHS arrived, and his life was changed, one day to become a doctor.

Most poor people could not afford a visit to an optician to get prescribed spectacles, so some elderly people would use a magnifying glass to read, or live for decades without that luxury. Presumably many workers were rather inefficient at their work from poor eyesight, but economists were too stupid to think of productivity.

Prior to the NHS, there had been area charity hospitals, dependent upon donations, but one imagines from arithmetic, that poorer areas had more patients and fewer donations.

There was little money to pay for the doctor’s knowledge, but plenty money was spent on advertising patent medicines which promised marvellous cures. Civilisation had discovered medical knowledge, which was denied you if you did not pay for it. But the economic system, exactly as today, favoured liars who advertised, benefitting from your ignorance, taking your money for dodgy products. Quite possibly, some patent medicines were helpful, but you could never know which, so depended on ‘old wives’ tales’. Ignorance favoured profits for the biggest liars, provided the advert made outlandish claims.

The biggest objection to the NHS was a famous argument, used over hundreds of years. ‘the Bottomless Pit’. If you began to care for the poor, there was no end to it.

While the NHS is admired, the ethical beliefs upon which it depends, are still attacked.

Neville Westerman by email