Introduction: historiographical contexts. Writing about the war and post-war period

Abstract

This book examines responses to health and sickness at a number of different levels – lay, medical and political – in Britain in the period from the outbreak of the Second World War and through the post-war period into the 1990s. Its focus is broader than the issue of the development of health services, which has so far attracted the lion's share of historians' attention. The latter interest has perhaps reflected the increasing twentieth-century preoccupation with the delivery of such services (Lewis, 1992 a). But the focus of this book enables questions to be asked about issues of continuity and of change. It also enables an examination of what is currently called the 'mixed economy' of health care, the shifting configuration between different 'providers' of health care, and their relationships with both the recipients of care and the state. One way of characterising the period overall is of the post-war rise, and recent decline, of the National Health Service (NHS). This is a common media representation of this period of health history at the time of writing. But there are other health issues at a wider level. The book will examine the changing balances of power within the medical profession, but also between the profession, the state and its agents of non-medical control. Its concern is also with a traditional area of health care, that provided by lay people, and especially by women. Their role has undergone considerable development in the light of recent policy changes. The concept of prevention, so important in the interwar discussions of health care reform, has been redefined in the post-war period to mean the individual's responsibility for health.