The natural history of disease

Ministry prepared dutifully to administer the service, and Britain obtained health care free at the point of delivery for all-a system which, despite exceeding all original financial estimates, became, in fact, the most cost-efficient in the world. Bevan realised a socialist dream, but Honigsbaum claims that the real ideological roots of National Health provision were the Christian principles of nineteenth-century reformers, such as the Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, who acknowledged that without a healthy people a nation possessed nothing. Recent historians, such as Charles Webster in his history of the Cabinet Office politics of the NHS, would challenge this assumption. In Webster's story, Labour politics were critical to the outcome. Honigsbaum's study, however, largely complements rather than contradicts Webster's analysis. Honigsbaum greatly enhances our understanding of the role of the civil service way beyond the review by John Pater, which suffered the inevitable limitations of being written by an insider. The book marvellously helps complete the jigsaw of the origins of the National Health Service.