ABSTRACT
As we have seen, one of the remarkable features of the development of the health service in the UK was the unanimity about the value of biomedicine. There may have been disagreements between trade unions and employers’ organizations and between middleclass and working-class women’s organizations about what the emphasis should be in health-care provision. But they were agreed that achieving better access to biomedicine was the issue. With hindsight we can see that not all the implications of this reliance on biomedicine were understood. By the 1980s it has become a fashionable and familiar quip to refer to the National Health Service as the National Sickness Service. Not only has any consensus that the NHS is organizationally the best way to provide biomedical care been broken in the 1980s, but there are increasing doubts about certain facets of biomedicine itself. However, although biomedicine may have become strongly dominant, it was not the only healing system available either before or after the Second World War. Not everybody was so attached to biomedicine as its success might lead one to imagine.
