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  • Article

How hospital care fails disabled bodies

Hospitals aim to make sick people well. But if the sick person is also disabled, the unbending nature of monolithic hospital systems can easily worsen the situation. Here Jamie Hale writes from painful personal experience.

  • Article

The father of handwashing

Doctors performing autopsies and then delivering babies – with not a hint of soap in between – was the grim recipe producing a lot of motherless offspring in the 1800s. But one man’s gargantuan efforts to upend accepted medical thinking turned the tide.

  • Article

NHS strikes and the decade of discontent

When the social unrest of the 1970s spread to the NHS, dissatisfied staff challenged the status quo for the first time in quarter of a century.

  • Article

Medics, migration and the NHS

In the 1960s the NHS became Britain’s biggest employer. So to help fill all those jobs, the government brought in thousands of workers from abroad.

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Images

  • Johannesburg Hospital, South Africa: nursing staff. Photograph, c. 1905.
  • University Children's Hospital, Vienna: portrait of nursing staff with a female child patient. Photograph, 1921.
  • Great Northern Central Hospital, Holloway Road, London: the nursing staff in the common room. Photograph, 1912.
  • Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, Scotland (during use as a military hospital): ten members of the nursing staff. Photograph, 1914/1918.
  • A hospital ward (acute surgical?), Newcastle: nursing and medical staff group portrait, April 1924. Copy photograph after the 1924 original.
  • Crimean War: Florence Nightingale and her staff nursing a patient in the military hospital at Scutari. Coloured lithograph, c. 1855, by T. Packer after himself.
  • Crimean War: Florence Nightingale and her staff nursing a patient in the military hospital at Scutari. Coloured lithograph, c. 1855, by T. Packer after himself.
  • A group of hospital staff, including nurses wearing matching straw hats, standing outdoors. Photograph.
  • Royal Portsmouth Hospital: Connaught Ward, with men patients, members of the medical staff, and nurses. Photograph, 1902.
  • Royal Portsmouth Hospital: children's ward, with patients, nurses and members of the medical staff. Photograph, 1902.
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Catalogue

All works (451)