Treasure trove of nursing pictures given digital treatment

As the NHS rapidly approaches its 70th birthday a recently uncovered archive of photographs has been made available to the public giving people a glimpse into healthcare in the years just before the NHS was founded.

Some 4,050 photographs documenting healthcare in Britain between 1938 and 1943 were discovered by staff at heritage agency Historic England's archive in Swindon.

They give a striking glimpse into wartime healthcare in the years before the NHS was founded in 1948, from training nurses to treating adults and children, and the medical procedures and equipment in use at the time.

As well as showing burns treatments, blood transfusions, sterilising equipment and X-rays, the images also reveal health staff enjoying their time off, ice skating on a frozen tennis court and riding carousels.

And the typed descriptions that accompany the images, which record the date, location, and details of staff and equipment, give insights into the attitudes of the time.

The wording accompanying one image of an exercise class includes the lines: "Peckham mothers can keep that schoolgirl figure. The cares of house-keeping and raising a family can play havoc with a mother's looks and bodily shapeliness."

The photographs were taken by the Topical Press Agency, but how they ended up in the archive is a mystery, Historic England said.

The collection is being made accessible to the public for the first time to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the NHS, which came into being on July 5, 1948.

Historic England has also produced resources for secondary school teachers to help students explore the history of medicine in the NHS's 70th year.

Funding from the Wellcome Trust has enabled 2,100 images to be digitised, as part of a year-long project to conserve, catalogue and digitise the entire collection, and they can be viewed and searched on the Historic England website.

Unfortunately no Shropshire photographs appear to be among the digitised collection, so we've cheated a bit and thrown in to the mix some local pre-NHS pictures, mostly from the collection of Brian Bennett, of Hanwood, a former nurse who worked for many years in the NHS in the county, serving at various hospitals, and who has become something of a local NHS historian.

At the time spanned by the photos in the Historic England collection Shropshire's prime hospital was the Royal Salop Infirmary in Shrewsbury town centre. The building still stands and is the Parade shopping centre.

Among other major hospitals were the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital at Gobowen, and the Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital on Town Walls in Shrewsbury backed up by a number of local cottage hospitals as well as, in wartime, various military hospitals.

Abigail Coats, archive cataloguing officer at Historic England, said: "Working with this collection every day has been fascinating and a real joy.

"The photographs reveal health and welfare provision at a time of social upheaval and change.

"But they also show staff having fun and unwinding after a long working day.

"You can see just how far some medical developments have come, but also what has stayed largely unchanged."

Duncan Wilson, Historic England's chief executive, said: "The Historic England Archive is full of countless gems but the Topical Press Agency images are particularly striking.

"Thanks to the Wellcome Trust we are able to conserve these photographs and share them with new audiences.

"They have the potential to expand our knowledge of wartime medical practice and revolutionary treatments and help us delve deeper into the history of healthcare."

The NHS was founded on July 5, 1948, following an official unveiling at Park Hospital - now Trafford General Hospital - in Manchester.

A total of 1,143 voluntary hospitals with some 90,000 beds and 1,545 municipal hospitals with 390,000 beds were subsumed within the new NHS.

General practitioners remained self-employed and largely independent.

It was the start of something big.