Martin Gorsky is Senior Lecturer in the Contemporary History of Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He most recently co-authored Mutualism and Health Care: hospital contributory schemes in twentieth century Britain. Sally Sheard is Senior Lecturer in History of Medicine at the University of Liverpool. She co-edited Body and City: histories of urban public health. Her most recent co-authored book is The Nation's Doctor: the role of the Chief Medical Officer, 1855-1998.

1 Introduction PART I Voluntary funding and the growth of hospital care 212 The price of charity to the Middlesex Hospital, 1750-1830 3 Charitable bodies: the funding of Birmingham's voluntary hospitals in the nineteenth century 4 Regional comparators in the funding and organisation of the voluntary hospital system, c.1860-1939 5 'The caprice of charity': geographical variations in the finances of British voluntary hospital services before the NHS PART II Local government and medical institutions 6 Paying for the sick poor: financing medicine under the Victorian Poor Law - the case of the Whitechapel Union, 1850-1900 7 Reluctant providers? The politics and ideology of municipal hospital finance 1870-1914 8 The Bradford Municipal Hospital experiment of 1920: the emergence of the mixed economy in hospital provision in inter-war Britain PART III General practice and health insurance 9 Friendly society health insurance in nineteenth-century England 10 'Strong combination': the Edwardian BMA and contract practice 11 The economic and medical significance of the British National Health Insurance Act, 1911 PART IV Contemporary issues 12 A double irony? The politics of National Health Service expenditure in the 1950s 13 Inequalities, regions and hospitals: the Resource Allocation Working Party 14 Financing health care in Britain since 1939

Financing Medicine brings together a collection of essays dealing with the financing of medical care in Britain since the mid-eighteenth century, with a view to addressing two major issues:
Why did the funding of the British health system develop in the way it did?
What were the ramifications of these arrangements for the nature and extent of health care before the NHS?
The book also goes on to explore the 'lessons' and legacies of the past which bear upon developments under the NHS.
The contributors to this volume provide a sustained and detailed examination of the model of health care which preceded the NHS - an organization whose distinctive features hold such fascination for the scholars of health systems - and their insights illuminate current debates on the future of the NHS.
For students and scholars of the history of medicine, this will prove essential reading.