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Building the NHS : planning, publics and Britain’s new state healthcare facilities, 1945-74
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DeVane, Edward Patrick (2022) Building the NHS : planning, publics and Britain’s new state healthcare facilities, 1945-74. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3821321
Abstract
This thesis uses five case studies of health centre and hospital development between 1945 and 1974, showing how planners and publics were a productive force in making the National Health Service (NHS) meaningful. During the period, the British state completed new healthcare facilities on a scale which has been largely unmatched since, with a popular attachment to the health services appearing to increase in parallel. I make sense of public attitudes to large-scale welfare state modernisation through an emphasis on place, showing that local knowledge, hierarchies and rituals provided a foundation for agency. In both rural and urban contexts, new healthcare spaces held particular significance to communities looking to renegotiate their relationship with the state. To further unpick these systems of feeling I posit the idea of emotional ecologies, an approach which focuses on how seemingly small conflicts could generate whole-system meaning. This thesis demonstrates that, to many, an affective bond with the health services was defined by built provision’s gestures of accommodation, attempts to democratise planning and appeals to local communities of patients. Towards the end of the period, I highlight definite limits to sensitive social democratic planning practice. Atmospheres of neglect could persist despite rebuilding and public confidence could be undermined by evidence of a private dependence on public investment for growth. The contribution of this thesis is therefore twofold: firstly, in challenging technocratic and national optics as inadequate lenses for understanding how NHS expansion was made possible. Secondly, the thesis synthesises a diversity of interlinked emotive processes in order to understand how popular impressions of the wider health service were made. Following a cultural turn in the historiography of the welfare state I add that, beyond opposing and resisting, many publics created their own deep attachments to the NHS through planning.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine |
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Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | National Health Services (Great Britain), National Health Services (Great Britain) -- History, National Health Services (Great Britain) -- Public opinion, National Health Services (Great Britain) -- Planning, National Health services -- Great Britain | ||||
Official Date: | March 2022 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Centre for the History of Medicine | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Thomson, Mathew ; Bivins, Roberta E., 1970- | ||||
Sponsors: | Wellcome Trust (London, England) | ||||
Format of File: | |||||
Extent: | xi, 330 leaves : illustrations | ||||
Language: | eng |
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