ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the quite distinct sets of proposals for government action on health care put forward at that time – two of which were set out in the Majority and Minority Reports of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, which sat from 1905 to 1909, while the third was adopted by the architects of the National Health Insurance scheme. Government-led developments in health care, in other words, were seen as a way to revive rather than undermine the public sphere. One of the most prominent of the organizations involved in Edwardian debates over health policy was the Charity Organisation Society, which was established in 1869 to advance a particularly doctrinaire version of prevailing Victorian views on the ends and means of social welfare. The public health medical services had expanded dramatically during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, particularly with the establishment of special hospitals to isolate and treat individuals suffering from infectious diseases.
