Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best Loved Institution

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Andrew's first book, Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best-Loved Institution (Yale University Press 2023) is an expansive history of a world-famous universal health care system. He traces how the service has changed and adapted, bringing together the experiences of patients, staff from Britain and abroad, and the service’s wider supporters and opponents. Britain’s National Health Service remains a cultural icon—a symbol of excellent, egalitarian care since its founding more than seven decades ago.

Rishi Sunak, knowing how that charge resonates with voters, will swear allegiance to state-run, collectivised healthcare although it is an affront to many of his party’s sacred beliefs. Yale University Press seemed the perfect fit in this regard, allowing for ample space for both the things that academics tend to care about (references and scholarly debates) and the things that the general public prioritise (accessible prose and human stories). As part of the book’s conclusion, I also offered some reflections on what the history of the NHS might mean in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. By highlighting these dynamics, I build on insights from prior historical scholarship (often informed by social science) that explained the resilience of welfare states through structural factors like the advantages of pooling risks or the power of ‘path dependence’ in social policy.Yet its success was hardly guaranteed, as Andrew Seaton makes clear in this elegantly written, highly original history of an institution that survived numerous crises to become a model for the democratic welfare state and the very antithesis of the health inequities we face today as Americans. From Clement Attlee to ‘Clap for Carers,’ this is a nuanced account of both the evolution of the NHS and the myth-making that came with it, as Seaton navigates the history of what is at once ‘Britain’s best-loved institution’ and a service perpetually seen to be in crisis.

With an appreciation of the motives of those who have attacked its founding principles, to penetrating analysis of its resilience, this book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the history of our NHS. As the government’s national archive for England, Wales and the United Kingdom, The National Archives hold over 1,000 years of the nation’s records for everyone to discover and use. The wide lens and varied material that underpins the book allowed me to answer two central questions. It was done with astonishing speed in the face of financial constraint, resistance from much of the medical establishment and the Conservative party.He trained in both the UK and the USA, gaining a doctorate in History from New York University (NYU) in 2021. Against the Sacred Cow': NHS Opposition and the Fellowship for Freedom in Medicine', Twentieth Century British History 26, no. An engaging, inclusive history of the NHS, exploring its surprising survival—and the people who have kept it running.

Seaton] is insightful on the ways that American conservatism, and its grotesque distortions of what state-funded medicine involves, have fed a British defensiveness that insulates the NHS from some of the more aggressive privatising impulses in the Tory party. It is explicit in his conclusion – that the tenacity of the NHS in fending off marketisation might serve as a model for the resurgence of egalitarian, social democratic politics in Britain.

The country that led global trends in privatisation of state assets and whose most electorally successful party makes a fetish of free-market enterprise finds itself also home to one of the world’s most popular and durable socialist institutions. It might be vulnerable to spoilage and neglect, but no one imagines it could be erased and no politician who wants to get elected will be caught suggesting such a thing. But idolatry doesn’t stop growing numbers of people turning to the private sector when they can’t get GP appointments or when the wait for operations is too long to bear. Environmental History and New Directions in Modern British Historiography', Twentieth Century British History 30, no.