Saturday, 25th May, 2013
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I remember people who’d had amputations crawling on the floor – they had no wheelchairs; they couldn’t afford an artificial limb, so they had to find a way to get about.
Retired Nurse Hannah Cooper.
There was no ante-natal care, or it was very limited. As a student I would go on domiciliary visits with trained midwives, who fortunately knew what they were doing. Labour was extremely dangerous for mother and child in these dreadful slums; there were terrifying emergencies. Once we had to deliver undiagnosed twins…
Retired Doctor Elinor Corfan
These quotations from the play ‘Cradle to Grave’ by poet Mandy Ross, a member of Birmingham Progressive Synagogue, remind us what health care was like in Britain prior to the founding of the National Health Service in 1948. At the time, the idea of universal health care, free at the point of delivery, was revolutionary and it transformed British society.
We have come to take the NHS for granted, the Jewish community not least, especially if we can pay for private health care. We forget the appalling situation faced by the poor before its founding. We ignore the fact that even in other developed countries, notably the USA, let alone poorer nations, people die because they cannot afford treatment for life-threatening conditions. Amidst all our criticisms, we fail to realise how efficient the NHS is: none of the countries with insurance-based health care systems contribute a smaller percentage of their GDP to health, and yet manage to treat their population regardless of income.
We also forget the imperative which should make us as Jews treasure and guard the NHS. For perhaps no other religion respects healing and medicine as much as we do. It is no coincidence that so many Jews have been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine. Healing is part of our ethos. As early as the second century CE the school of Rabbi Ishmael ruled, commenting on the verse from Exodus ‘He shall heal him completely’ (Ex. 21:19): ‘From here we learn that permission is given to the physician to heal.’ The permission to heal became an imperative, a mitzvah incumbent on all who had the skill to use it. The Talmud made it clear that the command to save life was more important than every single one of the other mitzvot, with just three exceptions (the prohibitions of murder, incest and idolatory). Although a physician could normally charge a fee, if anyone could not afford it then there was no question that he or she should be treated anyway. By the middle ages, this was so much accepted that physicians were engaged by Jewish communities in places such as Frankfurt in order to treat the poor, and the whole population was obligated to contribute to their payment.
Nowadays, our income tax is used for just the same purpose in Britain and as Jews we should be proud to contribute in this way, viewing it as a mitzvah to pay for the healing of the sick. As Mandy Ross puts in the Forward to her play: ‘We pay collectively so that we can all benefit. I believe that the NHS is an example of the best of what makes us human’. The principle of free treatment can no longer be taken for granted. Competition and the drive to meet targets means that less profitable fields, notably mental health and care for the elderly often fail to receive the priority they need. Destitute and desperately ill asylum seekers are even being turned away from hospitals and clinics, so much have we become focussed on targets and not on human beings in need of care.
As Jews, let us remind ourselves that healing is one of the greatest of all mitzvot, and that every single human life is of value and should be cared for. The NHS was founded to make sure these principles were put into practice for every person in need. Let us make sure it is still there for our children and grandchildren.
