Our NHS: A celebration of 50 years

Ed Gordon Macpherson

BMJ Books, £25, pp 227

ISBN 0 7279 1279 8

Reviewed BMJ 25 July 1998

For me, this book turned a vague intuition into a focus for action in the future: rarely before can the gulf in the NHS between “top down” aspirations and local experience have been charted with such directness and honesty.

There is a deep contrast in this volume, with its 30 contributions, between the repeated powerful endorsement of the NHS as a national institution and the troubling personal experience of some contributors. The NHS appears as an organisation that has been kept in place by negatives—the blind, even pathetic, loyalty of patients and the desire of politicians to avoid trouble about funding. Much of the personal experience has been highly disquieting, and the BMA itself appears as …