On July 5, the National Health Service celebrates its half century. Mike Waites looks at how it affected Bradford, and Marianne Sumner meets a doctor in at the landmark start of the Service.

The National Health Service officially began on July 5, 1948, emerging from the hotch-potch of hospitals, asylums and GP services dating back to the Victorian era, to be brought under Government control.

Before the war, less than half the population was covered for treatment by GPs under a system of medical insurance.

But non-working wives, children, the self-employed and many elderly people were not eligible and it did not normally cover hospital treatment.

The poor and children could get free care - but only if they submitted to a means test.

This inequality of access to care became the driving force for Health Minister Aneurin Bevan, in his bid to create a national health service open to all regardless of wealth in the face of stiff opposition from the medical establishment.

It was believed a comprehensive system of free health care would prevent and cure many common diseases and, in time, lead to a substantial drop in spending on health services.

Instead, advances in medical knowledge have led to massive increases in spending to treat a wider range of ailments using more and more hi-tech methods, while costs of care for the greater numbers of elderly people living longer have also gone up.

Figures show only about £260,000 was spent on hospital services in Bradford in 1947 the year before the NHS was created.

In 1996-7 this had risen to more than £110 million spent at St Luke's Hospital and Bradford Royal Infirmary out of total health spending in the Bradford Health Authority area which will soon exceed £300 million.

Despite the spiralling costs, many would regard the National Health Service as Britain's greatest post-war achievement and certainly the most lasting.

Substantial improvements in the standard of living, education and the environment have all arguably played a greater part in creating higher standards of health - but the free and equal access to care offered by the NHS remains unrivalled in the world.

THOSE WERE THE DAYS

This year is a special one for a former Bradford doctor who is not only celebrating his golden wedding, but also 50 years since he set up his surgery under the new National Health Service.

Dr Basil Messer married his bride Olive on June 23, 1948 and the pair had to cut their honeymoon short so they could be ready to face their first patients when the NHS began on July 5.

Dr Messer, who had worked as a consultant at the Central Middlesex Hospital in London, was told he would be out of a job at the start of the NHS if he did not go into general practice.

So he set up a surgery at 1 Undercliffe Street, between Undercliffe and Barkerend.

For many, the start of the NHS signalled a bizarre health bonanza as many local people cashed in on free treatments that had previously been far beyond their reach.

Now aged 78 and living in Leeds, Dr Messer said: "I had a month of general practice before the health service started. We had a collector who collected sixpence a week from the patients in our private practice, except working men. There was a kind of health service for working men, but not for their wives and children.

"When we opened it was like letting a child loose in a candy store. They would come in morning and night. There were no appointments and we saw everyone on demand.

"It was exhausting. The patients would come in the morning with, for example, a cough and we would give them a prescription for a bottle of medicine and in the evening they would say 'it's not working, can I have another?' I had to give them everything they wanted.

"Everybody had their teeth out. Lots of people who had neglected their teeth chose to have them out under the NHS."

He said the service was wonderful for the children.

"I would prescribe a lot of cod liver oil and malt for malnutrition. There was a lot of that where I was," he explained.

"Some children had no shoes and there was a special Cinderella fund to provide them with shoes. I would deliver 80 babies a year in patients' homes with the midwives who were excellent."

The lifestyle might have been a terrible shock to a newlywed, but luckily Mrs Messer had been given a good grounding.

She said: "I had lived in Canada with my aunt whose husband was a doctor and I had a knowledge of what it was like to live in a home which was also a surgery.

"Between us we had some fascinating traumatic times in Barkerend."

There was no doctor's receptionist - that was Mrs Messer's job in between looking after their two children, Laurence and Ruth. "It was advisable to be married," said Dr Messer with a chuckle.

"We were on duty 24-hours-a- day. We had half-a-day a week off and for that we had to do another doctor's half-day. You had to be well, but we were young. I was just 28 when it started."

Maybe it was this training which helped Mrs Messer, now 69, survive life as a councillor when she stood for election in the Shipley Central ward in 1968.

She later became Lord Mayor of Bradford in 1984.

But she still remembers the hectic days of their first surgery with fondness.

Mrs Messer said: "Saturday nights there were like a television programme because there was so much drama.

"You never knew who was going to be at the front door. They were wonderful days."

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