What was life like before the NHS?

[Tatami]

The NHS turned 75 yesterday. It got me thinking about what was life like before the NHS. I'm most interested in the 1920s and 30s, when my Grandmothers would have been born. Would my Great-Grandmothers and their generation most likely have given birth at home, paid a midwife or just relied on the wisdom of a relative or friend? They weren't at all wealthy. Were working men given priority for any free or charitable care? Is there a good book or any records where I can find out more? Thank you.

My dad had his adenoids out in the 1920's with no anaesthetic (read Roald Dahl's memoir for an account of that experience). Unthinkable now. My grandad had some sort of insurance/health club with his job and it covered essentials for him and his family but he had to pay in each week.

This threads made me feel both emotional and grateful.

I remember my mother telling me about having polio as a child and sleep in an iron lung. She would have been 75 this year, so thankful for her she will have been treated through the NHS. Having read all these comments, I can be almost sure if she'd have been the oldest sibling she wouldn't have survived polio

Thats £113 today going by the Bank of England calculator. I'm actually surprised it's so cheap.

I'd wonder what the average weekly wage was in 1928?

So much food for thought on this thread, thank you. I've ordered a copy of The Citadel and hope to settle down to read through it this weekend. I don't anticipate it will be an easy read, so I'll plan to do something outdoors too!

I think my original question has led me into two different directions. Firstly there's the incredible, absorbing, social history aspect. These things were happening to our families, just one or two generations ago. People we know the names of, have photographs of and our own memories of in many cases. That makes it personal, very emotive and fascinating. That was where my first interest lay.

Secondly there's the comparisons with modern day medicine and the importance of the NHS today for us all. I appreciate that healthcare and outcomes have changed significantly with vaccinations and antibiotics but I wonder what would have been an adequate, equivalent standard of care in the 1920s and 30s? Not great, just adequate. What could you expect if you had a modest, steady income (a shop keeper, for example). How many people were denied even an adequate standard of healthcare due to a lack of ability to pay?

This is where friendly societies came in. They were an inspiration to Nye Bevan as they were particularly strong in mining communities.

For a relatively small amount they provided health care , funeral help and help with sick pay.

They employed their own doctors and medical staff and ran their own hospitals.

However people were much more self reliant and so it came as a shock , when the NHS was formed , as to how much pent up demand there was eg for dentistry. It was free at first but the financial constraints of the Suez Crisis meant that charges were introduced for dentistry in the 50s.

It has to be said the euthanising of compromised infants and the sick was not just related to ability to pay for medical treatment. George V was given an overdose by his doctor to speed his end .

In 1925 a bricklayer would earn 97 shillings a week . The average wage was £204 a year amongst all workers.

@Tatami you can see what the lady paid for what was probably quite basic midwife care in 1928 £2.2

Google tells me average earnings were a shilling(5p) an hour so £1.5 for a 50 hour week.

So that's about a week and half's work to cover the midwife.

It's very frightening that people seem happy to accept we should have an insurance based health service.

Which really means people will end up falling down the cracks.

However I do think people should need to prove entitlement to NHS health care. To avoid health tourism and to stop people who have spent the majority of their working life elsewhere returning to make use of the NHS in their later years.

Why do you think the Nuns would be untrained? There is a very long history of nursing orders, who provided the most experienced and expert care available (partly because nuns could read).

why do you think senior nurses are still called ‘Sister’?

And it’s heavily romanticised.

My DM was born in the back bedroom of her grandmother's house in 1941 in a mining town. Someone had to cycle off with the money to get the doctor. It was a horrendous labour for my nan (big baby, small pelvis, would be a c-section today) and, I assume, with little to no pain relief. My DM had a lifelong scar on her scalp from the forceps. My DM ended up being an only child, as her DF couldn't face my nan going through that again.

In the 1970s my DB and I were born on the NHS by planned c-section (again, big babies/small pelvis). My own DC was an NHS emergency C-section after 24 hours of labour that stopped progressing. I'm very grateful to have had a safe delivery in a hospital, with proper pain relief and medical staff on hand and very conscious that only 2 generations ago the women in my family were labouring without any of that.

There’s a book called “ Tuppence to cross the Mersey “ which is a heartbreaking look at poverty and lack of healthcare in Liverpool.
The family are so poor and have to queue and beg for welfare , the mum has no money for baby milk , the kids all get ill. I read it years ago and it really stuck with me.
There must have been harrowing scenes like in this book going on across the full country before the NHS.

My uncle had mental health problems for most it his life. I've no idea how the family coped before the NHS. At one point he was committed to a hospital that my father said was shades of One Flew over the cuckoo's nest.

It wasn't really spoken about and he spent most of his life in an institution of some kind.

Medical care has come such a long way. The NHS has saved me on 3 separate occasions.

Burst appendix in my 20s, treated with Op, drips, painkillers and 3 lots of antibiotics.

Flu & pumonia while pregnant, treated with oxgyen, tamiflu and multiple antibiotics.

Hemorrhage after DC2, treated with ??? I don't actually know what they put into me. Or did down there 😳But I know they gave me a blood transfusion the next day.

I wouldn't like to add up the cost of that lot. And much of that treatment wouldn't have been available 75 years ago.

My nan gave birth to her first three children at home, one of her neighbours came round to help. No pain relief obviously but she said she was lucky her labour were easy. My mum was the youngest and born once the NHS had started, so she was able to go to the hospital.

My grandma's mum died following the birth of my grandma's sibling. They had saved up to pay for the midwife, but had no money left to pay for a Dr when she got ill immediately following the birth.

My grandma was then brought up by her grandparents because single dad's didn't bring up children back then. Her sibling was adopted as a newborn and she never met her. My grandma never really got over the loss of her family.

There was a BBC drama called Casualty 1900s which was pretty awful to watch. Treatments were as likely to kill yo7 as cure you and those without the means to be treated were not. It was a drama not a documentary but apparently based on real life accounts.

Jesus it's a miracle any of us are here considering the lottery life was back then. Just realised my dad was born pre NHS and he was the youngest of 7, my poor grandmother, what a champ.

I came here to suggest this

The books Call the Midwife are based on are very interesting reads. There’s a lot in them about pre-NHS life, the workhouses, the slum housing etc

My great grandma gave birth to 15 children of whom seven survived to adulthood. Her babies died one after another of ridiculous (in the modern world) things like diarrhoea. My grandma lost her second child aged ten months and her fourth aged 12 to meningitis. None of those deaths would have happened if they could have afforded healthcare.

I've just been to see Mark Rylance's latest play called Dr Semmelweis about a Hungarian man who very early on realised that so many women were dying from child birth because no one was washing their hands, or instruments.
Such a simple thing, but deadly.

I expect living to an old age was down to winning or losing the genetic lottery. Even with money I'd assume healthcare was limited almost 100 years ago. I definitely wouldn't have survived childbirth, but then neither would my mum and I would have died in the womb.

AcidTest, I am sorry to hear about your great grandmother. It may not be much consolation, but the likeliest cause of her death would have been puerperal sepsis - colloquially known as childbed fever - and in that pre antibiotic era there was no treatment. Even had she been able to afford a doctor, the outcome would probably have been the same. Maternal
death rates were hugely impacted by the first sulphonamide antibiotics in the 1930s and then the later commercial production of penicillin.
Before that there were just simple hygiene measures to try and reduce infection risk, but with a raw bleeding surface from the placental site, in women living with no proper bathing facilities in primitive conditions, it wasn’t easy to prevent septicaemia ensuing.