Matt Morgan: Rekindling the NHS’s foundational flame

One of the joys of writing this column is receiving emails from readers who work across a wide spectrum of medicine, from students to retired professors. I read one such email from a retired, fellow Cardiff alumnus in response to my last column discussing the new play Nye.After I’d watched the play at the National Theatre1—which dramatises the NHS’s origins through the eyes of Aneurin Bevan, former minister of health and architect of the NHS—a quote from Mark Twain came to my mind: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Bevan’s proposals for a universal healthcare system came at a time of crumbling infrastructure, long waits for medical treatment, wide health inequalities, and a postcode lottery for services. Sound familiar? But my email from E H Reynolds, who qualified from Cardiff in 1959, pointed out something different and less familiar.Reynolds described to me the partnership model that Bevan had…
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