Social Democratic Solidarity and the Welfare State: Health Care and Single-Tier Universality in Sweden and Canada.

Although it is not generally done, it is useful to compare the history of the evolution of universal health coverage (UHC) in Canada and Sweden. The majority of citizens in both countries have shared, and continue to share, a commitment to a strong form of single-tier universality in the design of their respective UHC systems. In the postwar era, they also share a remarkably similar timeline in the emergence and entrenchment of single-tier UHC, despite the political and social differences between the two countries. At the same time, UHC was initially designed, implemented, and managed by social democratic governments that held power for long periods of time, creating a path dependency for single-tier Medicare that was difficult for future governments of different ideological persuasions to alter.

Commentary: Serving the nation, serving the people: echoes of war in the early NHS.

It is something of a cliché to speak of Britain as having been transformed by the traumas of World War II and by its aftermath. From the advent of the 'cradle to grave' Welfare State to the end of (formal) empire, the effects of total war were enduring. Typically, they have been explored in relation to demographic, socioeconomic, technological and geopolitical trends and events. Yet as the articles in this volume observe across a variety of examples, World War II affected individuals, groups and communities in ways both intimate and immediate. For them, its effects were directly embodied That is, they were experienced physically and emotionally-in physical and mental wounds, in ruptured domesticities and new opportunities and in the wholesale disruption and re-formation of communities displaced by bombing and reconstruction. So it is, perhaps, unsurprising that Britain's post-war National Health Service, as the state institution charged with managing the bodies and behaviour of the British people, was itself permeated by a 'wartime spirit' long after the cessation of international hostilities.

When Did the Health Gradient Emerge? Social Class and Adult Mortality in Southern Sweden, 1813-2015.

Across today's developed world, there is a clear mortality gradient by socioeconomic status for all ages. It is often taken for granted that this gradient was as strong-or even stronger-in the past when social transfers were rudimentary and health care systems were less developed. Some studies based on cross-sectional data have supported this view, but others based on longitudinal data found that this was not the case. If there was no gradient in the past, when did it emerge? To answer this question, we examine social class differences in adult mortality for men and women in southern Sweden over a 200-year period, using unique individual-level register data. We find a systematic class gradient in adult mortality emerging at ages 30-59 only after 1950 for women and after 1970 for men, and in subsequent periods also observable for ages 60-89. Given that the mortality gradient emerged when Sweden transitioned into a modern welfare state with substantial social transfers and a universal health care system, this finding points to lifestyle and psychosocial factors as likely determinants.

A Comissão Nacional de Bem-estar Social: planejamento estatal e política social, 1951-1954 / The National Commission of Social Welfare: State planning and social policy, 1951-1954

Resumo O artigo analisa a criação da Comissão Nacional de Bem-estar Social no segundo governo Vargas (1951-1954). A partir das mensagens presidenciais e do acervo privado de Alzira Vargas do Amaral Peixoto, contextualiza o momento de fundação do órgão e suas conexões com órgãos internacionais de planejamento da política de assistência social.

Abstract The article analyzes the creation of the National Commission of Social Welfare (Comissão Nacional de Bem-Estar Social) during the second Vargas administration (1951-1954). Presidential communiqués and the private archive of Alzira do Amaral Peixoto Vargas are used to characterize the context of the founding of the commission and its liaison with international entities involved in the planning of social welfare policies.

Multiple Deprivation, the Inner City, and the Fracturing of the Welfare State: Glasgow, c. 1968-78.

From 1968, the central government established a series of area-based initiatives that operated on the basis of 'positive discrimination' towards the social needs of local residents. Over the course of the next 10 years, this area-based positive discrimination became an increasingly important part of social policy in Britain. This article uses Glasgow as a case study to show, first, how both the local and the central government attempted to define the problem of 'multiple deprivation' in the 1970s. Second, it shows how social studies were used to locate multiply deprived communities within urban areas, thereby feeding into the identification of the 'inner city' as a policy problem. Finally, this article shows how evidence of the concentration of multiple deprivation and the adoption of area-based strategies contributed to the fracturing of the welfare state, eroding the universalist principles upon which post-war social policy had been based.

Reconsidering 'Set the People Free': Neoliberalism and Freedom Rhetoric in Churchill's Conservative Party.

It is often assumed that 'Hayekian' or 'neoliberal' influences lay behind Conservative attacks on socialism in 1945 and subsequent calls to 'set the people free' in 1950 and 1951. This assumption has had consequences for our understanding of late-1940s Conservatism and for wider interpretations of post-war politics. Heeding recent calls to reconnect the inter-war and post-war parties and to pay closer attention to how opponents and contexts generate arguments, this article revisits senior Conservatives' rhetoric between 1945 and 1951 to break the link between neoliberal influence and freedom rhetoric. First, it argues that the rhetoric of 1945 was derived from a distinctly Conservative lineage of interwar argument and reflected strategies developed before the publication of F. A. Hayek's 'The Road to Serfdom'. Second, it demonstrates that senior Conservatives' emancipatory rhetoric in opposition after 1945 was neither a simple continuation of these themes nor primarily a response to the public's growing antipathy towards rationing and controls. Rather, such rhetoric was a complex response to Britain's immediate economic difficulties and the political challenges presented by austerity. Finally, the article sheds new light on the strategy that governed the party's campaigns in 1950 and 1951. Churchill and others' calls to 'set the people free' stemmed from a belief that the rhetorical opportunity lay in reconciling liberty with security. In that sense, the leadership had moved beyond begrudging compromises with the 'Attleean settlement' and was instead attempting to define a new identity within the parameters of the welfare state.

Disability in Mexico: a comparative analysis between descriptive models and historical periods using a timeline.

Some interpretations frequently argue that three Disability Models (DM) (Charity, Medical/Rehabilitation, and Social) correspond to historical periods in terms of chronological succession. These views permeate a priori within major official documents on the subject in Mexico. This paper intends to test whether this association is plausible by applying a timeline method. A document search was made with inclusion and exclusion criteria in databases to select representative studies with which to depict milestones in the timelines for each period. The following is demonstrated: 1) models should be considered as categories of analysis and not as historical periods, in that the prevalence of elements of the three models is present to date, and 2) the association between disability models and historical periods results in teleological interpretations of the history of disability in Mexico.

Disability in Mexico: a comparative analysis between descriptive models and historical periods using a timeline / Discapacidad en México: un análisis comparativo entre modelos descriptivos y periodos históricos mediante una línea del tiempo

Abstract: Some interpretations frequently argue that three Disability Models (DM) (Charity, Medical/Rehabilitation, and Social) correspond to historical periods in terms of chronological succession. These views permeate a priori within major official documents on the subject in Mexico. This paper intends to test whether this association is plausible by applying a timeline method. A document search was made with inclusion and exclusion criteria in databases to select representative studies with which to depict milestones in the timelines for each period. The following is demonstrated: 1) models should be considered as categories of analysis and not as historical periods, in that the prevalence of elements of the three models is present to date, and 2) the association between disability models and historical periods results in teleological interpretations of the history of disability in Mexico.

Resumen: Se argumenta que tres modelos de discapacidad (de prescindencia, médico/rehabilitador y social) se corresponden con periodos históricos en sucesión cronológica. Esta visión a priori ha permeado dentro de los principales documentos oficiales sobre el tema en México. El presente trabajo se propone probar si esta asociación es plausible, mediante la aplicación de una metodología de línea temporal. Se diseñó una estrategia de búsqueda con criterios de inclusión y exclusión en bases de datos para seleccionar estudios representativos, con los cuales se retomaron hitos a representar en la línea temporal por cada periodo. Se muestra que los modelos deben plantearse como categorías de análisis y no como periodos históricos, dado que: 1) existe prevalencia de elementos de los tres modelos en la coyuntura actual y 2) la asociación entre modelos y periodos da lugar a interpretaciones teleológicas de la historia de la discapacidad en México.

Lunatic Asylum in the Workhouse: St Peter's Hospital, Bristol, 1698-1861.

In recent years there has been growing acknowledgement of the place of workhouses within the range of institutional provision for mentally disordered people in nineteenth-century England. This article explores the situation in Bristol, where an entrenched workhouse-based model was retained for an extended period in the face of mounting external ideological and political pressures to provide a proper lunatic asylum. It signified a contest between the modernising, reformist inclinations of central state agencies and local bodies seeking to retain their freedom of action. The conflict exposed contrasting conceptions regarding the nature of services to which the insane poor were entitled. Bristol pioneered establishment of a central workhouse under the old Poor Law; 'St Peter's Hospital' was opened in 1698. As a multi-purpose welfare institution its clientele included 'lunatics' and 'idiots', for whom there was specific accommodation from before the 1760s. Despite an unhealthy city centre location and crowded, dilapidated buildings, the enterprising Bristol authorities secured St Peter's Hospital's designation as a county lunatic asylum in 1823. Its many deficiencies brought condemnation in the national survey of provision for the insane in 1844. In the period following the key lunacy legislation of 1845, the Home Office and Commissioners in Lunacy demanded the replacement of the putative lunatic asylum within Bristol's workhouse by a new borough asylum outside the city. The Bristol authorities resisted stoutly for several years, but were eventually forced to succumb and adopt the prescribed model of institutional care for the pauper insane.

Institutionalising senile dementia in 19th-century Britain.

This article explains how old, poor people living with dementia came to be institutionalised in 19th-century Britain (with a focus on London), and how they were responded to by the people who ran those institutions. The institutions in question are lunatic asylums, workhouses and charitable homes. Old people with dementia were admitted to lunatic asylums, workhouses and charitable homes, but were not welcome there. Using the records of Hanwell lunatic asylum, published texts of psychiatric theory, and the administrative records that all of these institutions generated at local and national levels, this article argues that 'the senile' were a perpetual classificatory residuum in the bureaucracy of 19th-century health and welfare. They were too weak and unresponsive to adhere to the norms of the asylum regime, yet too challenging in their behaviour to conform to that of the workhouse, or the charitable home. Across all of these institutions, old people with dementia were represented as an intractable burden, many decades before the 'ageing society' became a demographic reality.

Healthcare before Welfare States: Hospitals in Early Twentieth Century England and France.

Following the. Second World War, many west European nations developed welfare states to enhance the health and security of their populations, but the systems that were created differed significantly in form and function. This article will provide a comparative overview of the development of hospital services in urban England and France in the first forty years of the 20th century using evidence from two case study cities to enhance our understanding of how these welfare systems developed. It will consider the structure of the two hospital systems; governance and accountability; institutional finance; patients; and the role of the central and local state to argue that the maintenance of two separate providers and the exclusion of hospitals from state health insurance in England prompted a different set of responses to the delivery of hospital care compared to what was found in the unified and increasingly state-funded French system.

[Philanthropy and welfare policies for the families of people with leprosy in the Brazilian state of Goiás, 1920-1962]. / Filantropia e política de assistência às famílias de doentes de lepra em Goiás, 1920-1962.

This article analyzes the root causes of the shortage of social support for the relatives of people with leprosy, especially their children, in the state of Goiás, Central West region of Brazil, between 1920 and 1962. It focuses on the constitution of discourses that defined the medical and philanthropic care for the children of people isolated in leper colonies as a problem, and how this process resulted in the organization of the Society for the Welfare of Lepers and Defense Against Leprosy, and the construction of Afrânio de Azevedo children's home in Goiânia, the state capital. These elements are directly associated with the construction of a new approach in the regional history and social and medical policies for leprosy.

Medico-Artistic Complicities on Swedish Stages: The Boys in the Band and the Regulation of Gay Male Representation in the Welfare State.

Seeking to understand the highly unfavorable conditions for the development of gay male theater in Sweden, this essay engages in a historical study of the national opening of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band at Malmö City Theatre in 1970. Propelled by a Foucauldian-inspired theoretical approach, it identifies the subtle, yet highly effective, measures of control that the, at the time, social democratic welfare state exercised over representations of homosexuality on stage. State representatives, who complied with the official political and medical doctrine that homosexuality was a mental illness and posed a potential threat to social stability, interfered at various levels of the production, including the rehearsal process and post-performance talks between cast members and audiences. This alliance between Swedish theaters and members of the medical, psychological, and sexological professions constituted a medico-artistic complicity that supervised and regulated early attempts of gay representation on stage.

Rescuing from oblivion: social characteristics and career destinations of early British 'sociology' graduates, 1907-39.

Those students who were among the first sociology graduates in the UK barely feature in standard histories of the discipline, which all have an intellectual and institutional focus. This article remedies this neglect by researching the social backgrounds and later careers of sociology graduates from the London School of Economics and Political Science [LSE] and Bedford College for Women from the first such graduate in 1907 until those graduating in the 1930s. Data for this exercise were compiled from a variety of sources. The more important are: UK censuses, especially that of 1911; various civil registration records; archived student files; and, for the graduates who entered university teaching, issues of the Yearbook of the Universities of the Empire [later the Commonwealth Universities' Yearbook]. The dataset includes all identified graduates in the BSc(Econ), Special Subject Sociology, degree from 1907 to 1935 and all in the BA (Honours) in Sociology degree from 1925 to 1939. LSE sociology graduates tended to be older and to have more cosmopolitan backgrounds, with fathers more likely than for Bedford College graduates to come from commercial rather than professional backgrounds. Both institutions' graduates' careers tended to the Civil Service and local government. LSE graduates gravitated to education, especially to higher education if male, whilst those of Bedford College went into welfare work, countering a stereotype from some previous literature that especially women graduates were heavily constrained to follow careers in schoolteaching. The article also gives comparisons with the social-class profile and career destinations of several cohorts of postwar sociology graduates, noting a number of similarities.