ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is the emergence of medical insurance provided by the friendly societies. These were voluntary-sector mutual associations whose activities were later to influence the structure of health care under the early welfare state. Not only was sickness insurance, in Beveridge’s words, ‘the invention of friendly societies’, but the system of panel practice, by which GPs were contracted by the state to attend National Health Insurance (NHI) patients, also built on existing friendly society arrangements for the employment of doctors.2
