Financing Medicine

Martin Gorsky is Senior Lecturer in the Contemporary History of Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He most recently co-authored Mutualism and Health Care: hospital contributory schemes in twentieth century Britain. Sally Sheard is Senior Lecturer in History of Medicine at the University of Liverpool. She co-edited Body and City: histories of urban public health. Her most recent co-authored book is The Nation’s Doctor: the role of the Chief Medical Officer, 1855–1998.

• 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