Free Exhibition: Here Comes Good Health! at The Wellcome Collection
Once upon a time in this land, there existed no National Health Service. Just one lifetime away, children died of diphtheria, a terrifying disease that strangles the life out of its victims, measles, and scarlet fever. They suffered with tuberculosis, rickets, anaemia, malnutrition and postural defects. Families were crowded into small terraces, a 1930 report describing 8 room houses being occupied by six families of 15 adults and 19 children.
The 'hero' of this Bermondsey story at the Wellcome Collection is MP for Bermondsey, Dr Alfred Salter, who lost his own daughter aged 8 to scarlet fever, and his wife Ada, the first female Mayor in London. They had a clear mission to work for better public health, including producing 'health propaganda' that aimed to promote messages about cleanliness, nutrition, child welfare and immunisation as well as improving health services for the poor of Bermondsey. Doctors like Salter, who did not ask people to pay for his services if they couldn't, paved the way for a National Health Service, understanding as they did the effects that 100 years of industrialisation and then a catastrophic war were having on the nation's poorest.
The lightbox exhibition at the Wellcome Collection is a reminder of what public health reform meant. To listen to politicians today, you would think that it was about the idle populace trying to get something for nothing out of a state that has better things to do than concern itself with public health and welfare. The narratives of today dismiss this kind of history as sentimental. How could we go back to such conditions in this modern shiny world? Well, judging from recent housing reportage, all too easily, and with such slum like conditions, must come the return of the kind of problems with health that the politicians and reformers of the 1920s and 30s would have hoped to never see again.
Look how far we've come, let's not let anyone take that us back to that past.
Alfred Salter on Wikipedia
Here Comes Good Health! at The Wellcome Collection : watch the films online
Charley your very good health : 1948 government cartoon explaining the Health Act that established the National Health Service
Once upon a time in this land, there existed no National Health Service. Just one lifetime away, children died of diphtheria, a terrifying disease that strangles the life out of its victims, measles, and scarlet fever. They suffered with tuberculosis, rickets, anaemia, malnutrition and postural defects. Families were crowded into small terraces, a 1930 report describing 8 room houses being occupied by six families of 15 adults and 19 children.
The 'hero' of this Bermondsey story at the Wellcome Collection is MP for Bermondsey, Dr Alfred Salter, who lost his own daughter aged 8 to scarlet fever, and his wife Ada, the first female Mayor in London. They had a clear mission to work for better public health, including producing 'health propaganda' that aimed to promote messages about cleanliness, nutrition, child welfare and immunisation as well as improving health services for the poor of Bermondsey. Doctors like Salter, who did not ask people to pay for his services if they couldn't, paved the way for a National Health Service, understanding as they did the effects that 100 years of industrialisation and then a catastrophic war were having on the nation's poorest.
The lightbox exhibition at the Wellcome Collection is a reminder of what public health reform meant. To listen to politicians today, you would think that it was about the idle populace trying to get something for nothing out of a state that has better things to do than concern itself with public health and welfare. The narratives of today dismiss this kind of history as sentimental. How could we go back to such conditions in this modern shiny world? Well, judging from recent housing reportage, all too easily, and with such slum like conditions, must come the return of the kind of problems with health that the politicians and reformers of the 1920s and 30s would have hoped to never see again.
Look how far we've come, let's not let anyone take that us back to that past.
Alfred Salter on Wikipedia
Here Comes Good Health! at The Wellcome Collection : watch the films online
Charley your very good health : 1948 government cartoon explaining the Health Act that established the National Health Service
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