Cradle to Grave

The book examines, for the first time in any detail or in any depth, the provision of municipal medicine in interwar England and Wales at both national and local case-study levels. Municipal health care was an important, but historically neglected, part of the British health care system in this period. The book presents conceptual and empirical perspectives on interwar municipal medicine in England. Using a mixture of under-utilised quantitative and archival data, it explores the patterns of local authority medical services at both national and local levels.

What emerges is a complex pattern of provision which touched on all areas of healthcare from the ‘cradle to the grave’, but with very different priorities and forms in different places. In turn, this raises important questions about the role of local government in this period before the advent of the National Health Service and thereby the subsequent history of health care in England.