Copyright Martin Gorsky and John Mohan 2006
The right of Martin Gorsky, John Mohan and Tim Willis to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN 978 0 7190 6578 1
First published 2006
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Acknowledgements
The research on which this book is based was funded by grants from the Lever-hulme Trust and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (grant no. RES-00-22-0044) and we are indebted to them for their support. John Mohans work on this book was carried out while working at the Geography Department, University of Portsmouth, and he gratefully acknowledges institutional support and specifically assistance with typing and with production of illustrations. John Mohan would also like to acknowledge the support of an Erskine Fellowship at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, during which parts of this book were drafted, and the hospitality of Ross Barnett and colleagues in the Geography Department during his stay there. Martin Gorsky began work on this book at the University of Wolverhampton, and completed it at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as a recipient of a Wellcome Trust University Award (20049). He is most grateful to colleagues at both institutions for their encouragement.
Our greatest debt is to officials of surviving contributory schemes (or health cash plans as they are generally known today) who have facilitated access to the archival sources on which we have drawn. In particular, we thank: Graham Moore of the Westfield Health Scheme, Sheffield, who granted access to the records of Westfields pre-National Health Service ancestor, the Sheffield and District Hospitals Council Fund; Liz Price, for access to records of the Patients Aid Association, Wolverhampton; Carolyn Bell and Steve Fritz, for access to the records of the post-1948 British Hospitals Contributory Schemes Association; Bill Gaywood, of Medicash, Liverpool (formerly the Merseyside Hospitals Council); Des Benjamin, of HSA Healthcare (formerly the Hospital Saving Association); Peter Maskell, of Birmingham Hospitals Saturday Fund; Martin Wren, of Bristol Contributory Welfare Association; Richard Sear, of Healthsure; and Peter Green, of Bolton and District Hospital Saturday Council.
We are also grateful to the participants at a seminar we held to mark the end of this project, which brought together officials from several cash plans, academics, MPs, and representatives of think-tanks and the Department of Health. The seminar was hosted by the Institute for Historical Research, with some funding from the ESRC and the Society for the Social History of Medicine. We should particularly mention Rodney Lowe, Steven Cherry and Calum Paton, who acted as discussants of the three papers presented, and whose comments were most helpful in revising them for publication.
Versions of papers based on this work have also been presented at: the Fifth International Conference on Urban History, Berlin, 2000; the Medicine and Society in the Midlands 17501950 Conference, University of Birmingham, 2003; the 6th Conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, Oslo, 2003; the 5th European Social Science History Conference, Berlin, 2004; the Stein Rokkan Centre workshop on the History of Medicine and Health, Bergen, 2005; and the 11th Medical Geography Symposium, Fort Worth, 2005. We are grateful to participants at those meetings for their comments. Our work on hospital contribution in Birmingham will appear as a chapter in J. Reinarz (ed.), Medicine and Society in the Midlands 17501950, to be published in 2007 as a supplement to Midland History, and we thank Jonathan Reinarz for his encouragement.
We owe a special debt to Bernard Harris, who commented in detail and with insight on the first draft of this book. Others who have commented on our work are David Gilbert, Nick Mays, John Benson, Virginia Berridge and Barry Doyle. We are most grateful to all of the above but take full responsibility for the final version of the book.
The primary research for, and the writing of, the book were divided in the following way: John Mohan extended an existing database on pre-war voluntary hospitals to include information on the schemes, and also conducted primary research at the Public Record Office (PRO), the British Library newspapers section and the British Library of Political and Economic Science (BLPES) at the London School of Economics; Martin Gorsky carried out archival work on the records of schemes in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Sunderland, Gloucestershire, Winchester, Bristol and Wolverhampton; Tim Willis was research fellow on the project and undertook archival work on schemes in Sheffield, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bolton and Leeds, on the records of the British Hospitals Contributory Schemes Association (BHCSA) in Leeds and London, and at the PRO. Gorsky was responsible for writing were co-authored by Gorsky and Mohan. We take joint responsibility for the whole of the final product.
For their courteous and efficient service we thank the staffs of Tyne and Wear Archives Services, Birmingham Central Library, Merseyside Record Office, University of Edinburgh Library Special Collections, Hampshire Record Office, the Mitchell Library, Glasgow (where Alastair Toughs advice was also invaluable), the National Archives of Scotland, the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland, the Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies Service, and the Bolton Archives and Local Studies Service.
Finally, we are grateful to several organisations for permission to reproduce copyright material, as follows. Parts of , League of Subscribers annual report, by courtesy of Lothian Health Services Archive, Collections Division, University of Edinburgh Library.
And last, but by no means least, we would like to thank our families for their constant support during the period of writing this book.
Martin Gorsky
John Mohan
