George Orwell on hospitals in the first half of the 20th century (1946)

It's hard to think that this was published within my own lifetime.

  

George Orwell, from How the Poor Die, November 1946:

  

“Anaesthetics were a turning point, and disinfectants were another…Moreover, the national health insurance has partly done away with the idea that a working-class patient is a pauper who deserves little consideration. Well into this century it was usual for ‘free’ patients at the big hospitals to have their teeth extracted with no anaesthetic. They didn’t pay, so why should they have an anaesthetic – that was the attitude. That too has changed…I would be far from complaining about the treatment I have received in any English hospital, but I do know that it is a sound instinct that warns people to keep out of hospitals if possible, and especially out of the public wards…and it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots. However great the kindness and the efficiency, in every hospital death there will be some cruel, squalid detail, something perhaps too small to be told but leaving terribly painful memories behind, arising out of the haste, the crowding, the impersonality of a place where every day people are dying among strangers.”

How things have changed since 1946 (and especially since July, 1948), and how greatly we all value and depend on the NHS!


Of related historical interest, from Adventures in Two Worlds by A. J. Cronin, 1952 (reminiscences of a doctor):

“There was plenty of interesting work for me. Under the medical-aid scheme which had engaged me, all the miners paid a small weekly contribution to the society and were entitled thereby to free medical treatment for their families and themselves. In actual fact, this scheme can definitely be regarded as the foundation of the plan of socialised medicine which was eventually adopted by Great Britain. Aneurin Bevan, who was mainly responsible for the national project, was at one time a miner in Tredegar, and here, under the local aid organisation, the value of prompt and gratuitous treatment for the worker was strongly impressed upon him.
  There is certainly virtue in the scheme, but it also has its defects, of which the chief one, in Tredegar, was this–with complete carte blanche in the way of medical attention the people were not sparing, by day or night, in ‘fetching the doctor’. In a word, the plan fostered hypochondriacs, malingerers, and those obnoxious ‘hangers-on’ who haunt a doctor’s surgery in the hope of obtaining something–spectacles, crepe bandages, cotton-wool and dressings, even a Seidlitz powder–for nothing.”