Summer hols: a kind friend put me up in Normandy for a week. On the train on the way back I gathered from Le Monde that the NHS has been dragged into the US newscycle as President Obama attempts to introduce his health reforms. This gives me the chance to add to an ongoing series of this blog: "things we didn't include for a number of reasons". In this case, Alexander Fleming's petri dish containing the first batch of penicillin, which would have been the star of a section on the birth of the NHS - or at least the relationship between the state, public health and medicine (as well as an in-gallery link to UK PubMed). We were able to include some of these issues in a section on the Welfare State, and in a series of audio excerpts and films from the 1940s. The current debate does, I think, underscore the ways that healthcare and social welfare inform a nation's idea of what is meant by a right.
Le Monde, by the way, was happy to quote what I assume was the [London] Times:
"Qui des Etats-Unis ou du Royaume-Uni a le meilleur système de santé ? La réponse est probablement : la France."
