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‘A wonderful opportunity’: VD in the NHS

On 5 July 1948, Britain’s National Health Service came blinking into the light. As Aneurin Bevan acknowledged in his front-page messages in the Lancet and BMJ that same week, ‘It has not had an altogether trouble-free gestation! There have been understandable anxieties, inevitable in so great and novel an undertaking.’ Increasingly , these anxieties have become a focus of scholarly attention. But one important aspect of the new NHS remains understudied: sexual health. With its birth, the NHS absorbed another, much older health service that was also universally available and free at the point of use. The VD Service had become part of a wider landscape of progressive interwar health and welfare policies. But by the end of the Second World War, it was groaning under the weight of its own inefficiency and inadequate resources. The NHS therefore offered a much-needed revitalisation. There was much anxiety over what such a transition would entail. By exploring the VD Service’s integration into the NHS, this paper begins to chart the profound changes taking place in sexual healthcare at mid-century.