This book offers an illuminating introduction to many aspects of health and society in twentieth-century Wales, ranging from public health to personal lifestyles and household budgets, birth control and the incidence of deaths from child-birth. Chapters variously feature the life of an eminent doctor and refugee doctors who came to Wales, and describe the training of nurses, under the close supervision of matron, in a district hospital in north Wales.

The book analyses changes both from above and below. Drawing on newly released official government papers, the official historian of the NHS reveals the full extent of the negotiations which preceded the devolution of health administration powers to the Welsh Office in 1969. The former Director of NHS Wales explains how Wales began to forge its own independent approach to health service matters, pioneering innovations which were subsequently adopted elsewhere in the UK. A retired general practitioner offers his view, from below, of the health problems and inadequate services in Wales.

Finally, a sociologist and a social policy analyst each provide a wider picture and offer a framework which will enable the reader to appreciate the distinctiveness of Wales’s own story of health and the health service in the twentieth century.