In Place of Fear

Abstract

Woodley, the then Unite joint general secretary, wrote:-'The NHS is the greatest single triumph of social democracy in Britain and is a tribute above all to its founder, Nye Bevan.' Welshman Bevan was born in 1897 and started work down the coal mines at aged 14. He led the Welsh miners in the 1926 General Strike before entering Parliament in 1929. Having been appointed Minister of Health in the radical post war Labour government, Bevan masterminded the founding of the National Health Service in 1948, resigning his Minister of Labour cabinet post over the issue of NHS charges three years later. He died in 1960. THE field in which the claims of individual commercialism come into most immediate conflict with reputable notions of social values is that of health. That is true both for curative and preventive medicine. The preventive health services of modern society fight the battle over a wider front and therefore less dramatically than is, the case with personal medicine.