“Hunger, filth, fear and death”: remembering life before the NHS

[Ken Burch]

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/10/hunger-filth-fear-and-death-remembering-life-nhs

(Written by Harry Leslie Smith, a 91-year old RAF veteran born into a mining family)

By the time I was weaned from my mother’s breast, I had begun to learn the cruel lessons that the world inflicted on its poor. At the age of seven, my eldest sister, Marion, contracted tuberculosis, which was a common and deadly disease for those who lived hand to mouth in early-20th-century Britain. Her illness was directly spawned from our poverty, which forced us to live in a series of fetid slums.

Despite being a full-time worker, my dad was always one pay packet away from destitution. Several times, my family did midnight flits and moved from one decre­pit single-bedroom tenement to the next. Yet we never seemed to move far from the town’s tip, a giant wasteland stacked with rotting rubbish, which became a playground for preschool children.

At the beginning of my life, affordable health care was out of reach for much of the population. A doctor’s visit could cost the equivalent of half a week’s wages, so most people relied on good fortune rather than medical advice to see them safely through an illness. But luck and guile went only so far and many lives were snatched away before they had a chance to start. The wages of the ordinary worker were at a mere subsistence level and therefore medicine or simple rest was out of the question for many people.

Unfortunately for my sister, luck was also in short supply in our household. Because my parents could neither afford to see a consultant nor send my sister to a sanatorium, Marion’s TB spread and infected her spine, leaving her an invalid.

By the time I was weaned from my mother’s breast, I had begun to learn the cruel lessons that the world inflicted on its poor. At the age of seven, my eldest sister, Marion, contracted tuberculosis, which was a common and deadly disease for those who lived hand to mouth in early-20th-century Britain. Her illness was directly spawned from our poverty, which forced us to live in a series of fetid slums.

Despite being a full-time worker, my dad was always one pay packet away from destitution. Several times, my family did midnight flits and moved from one decre­pit single-bedroom tenement to the next. Yet we never seemed to move far from the town’s tip, a giant wasteland stacked with rotting rubbish, which became a playground for preschool children.

At the beginning of my life, affordable health care was out of reach for much of the population. A doctor’s visit could cost the equivalent of half a week’s wages, so most people relied on good fortune rather than medical advice to see them safely through an illness. But luck and guile went only so far and many lives were snatched away before they had a chance to start. The wages of the ordinary worker were at a mere subsistence level and therefore medicine or simple rest was out of the question for many people.

Unfortunately for my sister, luck was also in short supply in our household. Because my parents could neither afford to see a consultant nor send my sister to a sanatorium, Marion’s TB spread and infected her spine, leaving her an invalid.

By the time I was weaned from my mother’s breast, I had begun to learn the cruel lessons that the world inflicted on its poor. At the age of seven, my eldest sister, Marion, contracted tuberculosis, which was a common and deadly disease for those who lived hand to mouth in early-20th-century Britain. Her illness was directly spawned from our poverty, which forced us to live in a series of fetid slums.

Despite being a full-time worker, my dad was always one pay packet away from destitution. Several times, my family did midnight flits and moved from one decre­pit single-bedroom tenement to the next. Yet we never seemed to move far from the town’s tip, a giant wasteland stacked with rotting rubbish, which became a playground for preschool children.

At the beginning of my life, affordable health care was out of reach for much of the population. A doctor’s visit could cost the equivalent of half a week’s wages, so most people relied on good fortune rather than medical advice to see them safely through an illness. But luck and guile went only so far and many lives were snatched away before they had a chance to start. The wages of the ordinary worker were at a mere subsistence level and therefore medicine or simple rest was out of the question for many people.

Unfortunately for my sister, luck was also in short supply in our household. Because my parents could neither afford to see a consultant nor send my sister to a sanatorium, Marion’s TB spread and infected her spine, leaving her an invalid.

Harry Leslie Smith is the author of a memoir: “Harry’s Last Stand: How the World My Generation Built is Falling Down and What We Can Do to Save it” (Icon Books, £8.99)

[Warpy]

1. It sounds a lot the way the working poor live in the US right now

Most working poor are one to three paychecks away from disaster. We don't have the crowding or heavy smog they had in pre WWII Britain, so we don't tend to get the same diseases. However, lives are being shortened and people are getting sicker and sicker from things that could be treated outside the hospital were there access to health care to identify and treat them before the person shows up at an ER more dead than alive. Even copays and deductibles are insurmountable barriers to people on lower than subsistence wages.

While we don't have workhouses, we do have homeless shelters that are breeding grounds for disease as people are housed in dormitories with little space between them.

And if you want to know why so many people are poor, look at the fortunes the 0.1% have amassed in the last 30 years and how little they return to support the world around them.

[Ken Burch]

2. Indeed. And those who dominate both of our major parties(including this one)

Are pretty much ok with that. Class and poverty are barred topics in U.S. elections.

[Doctor_J]

3. Here we have those and bankruptcy too

So we should never say that privatized health care adds nothing.

[Louisiana1976]

4. America needs single payer. Our current healthcare system is greed-based. Obamacare doesn't

benefit the people--it benefits insurance companies.

[LeftishBrit]

5. k&r; should be compulsory reading for Cameron, Hunt et al

Last edited Mon Nov 3, 2014, 03:35 AM - Edit history (1)

For anyone who can get hold of it, I also recommend Pam Schweitzer: Can We Afford the Doctor?; Age Exchange Theatre Trust, 1985. It's a collection of elderly people's reminiscences about health and illness in the early 20th century, when access to healthcare depended on whether one could afford it.

America never completely moved from that time; and Britain may go back to it if we don't get a new government pretty soon.

[catnhatnh]

6. I can't recommend this one highly enough

A searing indictment of a once and future right wing dystopia...