In this essay, Jack Saunders explores our complex relationship with the NHS, its staff and its history.

Jack Saunders is Lecturer in modern British history at University College London. He is author of Assembling Cultures: Workplace Activism, Labour Militancy and Cultural Change in Britain's Car Factories, 1945-82 (2020) and has published widely on the history of work in post-war Britain. This essay draws on his research for the People's History of the NHS project, some of which will published in the forthcoming edited volume by Jenny Crane and Jane Hand, Posters, Placards and Prescriptions: Cultural Histories of the NHS.

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