Harvard Medical School
Saving Britain’s health service

NO SPECTACLE is “so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”, harrumphed Thomas Macaulay, a Victorian historian. Today there is no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of panic about the National Health Service (NHS). Every decade or so the government tries to reform the NHS—and every decade or so the NHS masses its forces to work the public into a frenzy.