Financing Medicine

<p><em>Financing Medicine </em>brings together a collection of essays dealing with the financing of medical care in Britain since the mid-eighteenth century, with a view to addressing two major issues:</p><ul> <li>Why did the funding of the British health system develop in the way it did?</li> <li>What were the ramifications of these arrangements for the nature and extent of health care before the NHS? </li> </ul><p>The book also goes on to explore the 'lessons' and legacies of the past which bear upon developments under the NHS. </p><p>The contributors to this volume provide a sustained and detailed examination of the model of health care which preceded the NHS - an organization whose distinctive features hold such fascination for the scholars of health systems - and their insights illuminate current debates on the future of the NHS.</p><p>For students and scholars of the history of medicine, this will prove essential reading.</p> 1 Introduction PART I Voluntary funding and the growth of hospital care 212 The price of charity to the Middlesex Hospital, 1750–1830 3 Charitable bodies: the funding of Birmingham’s voluntary hospitals in the nineteenth century 4 Regional comparators in the funding and organisation of the voluntary hospital system, c.1860–1939 5 ‘The caprice of charity’: geographical variations in the finances of British voluntary hospital services before the NHS PART II Local government and medical institutions 6 Paying for the sick poor: financing medicine under the Victorian Poor Law – the case of the Whitechapel Union, 1850–1900 7 Reluctant providers? The politics and ideology of municipal hospital finance 1870–1914 8 The Bradford Municipal Hospital experiment of 1920: the emergence of the mixed economy in hospital provision in inter-war Britain PART III General practice and health insurance 9 Friendly society health insurance in nineteenth-century England 10 ‘Strong combination’: the Edwardian BMA and contract practice 11 The economic and medical significance of the British National Health Insurance Act, 1911 PART IV Contemporary issues 12 A double irony? The politics of National Health Service expenditure in the 1950s 13 Inequalities, regions and hospitals: the Resource Allocation Working Party 14 Financing health care in Britain since 1939