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.

Eggs, rags and whist drives: popular munificence and the development of provincial medical voluntarism between the wars.

Drawing on hospital reports, committee minutes and the local press, this article examines the changing landscape of urban civic culture and challenges the pessimistic accounts of charitable financial support for voluntary hospitals in inter-war England.Through case studies of hospitals in four of the largest cities in the country, it assesses the extent to which voluntary resources of time and money continued to underpin day-to-day institutional income, stimulate the development of the hospitals' estates and investments, and enable hospitals to cut costs through the receipt of gifts in kind. It argues that by broadening the bases of charitable income, hospitals were freed from their dependence on the wealthy thus ensuring their transformation to modern community resources for all.