Waiting for the Doctor: Managing Time and Emotion in the British National Health Service, 1948–80

Abstract

This article examines patients’ and doctors’ emotional and psychological entanglements with the development of appointment systems in British general practice between the 1948 and 1980. Waiting, especially in the form of the queue, has been subject to recent historical analyses. However, the focus has often been on negative emotional responses, on how waiting has been politicized, and on the disciplinary power of the waiting room. Frameworks of rationalization and discipline have also dominated historical and sociological assessments of temporal regulation, and especially the rise of standardized, ordered, clock and calendar time that appointments embodied. Though productive, focusing too closely on these processes in relation to time and waiting risks underplaying the complex affective life of regulatory technologies, for both their operators and their subjects. By focusing tightly on how myriad, often contradictory, responses to appointment systems operated within the setting of post-war general practice, this article looks to place such emotional and psychological relations in historical context. In so doing, it develops recent work on the emotional history of the National Health Service and, by extension, of the diverse affective and temporal modes of the British welfare state.