Endorsements

Managing diabetes, managing medicine examines the emergence of managed medicine in Britain. Through its study of diabetes care in the twentieth century, this book offers the first historical monograph to explore how the decision-making and labour of medical professionals became subject to bureaucratic regulation and managerial oversight. Whereas much existing literature has cast health care management as either a political imposition or an assertion of medical control, this work positions managerial medicine as a co-constructed venture. Although driven by different - even conflicting - motives, doctors and nurses, national professional and patient bodies, British government agencies, and influential international organisations were all integral to the creation of managerial systems in Britain; all working within a context of considerable professional, political, technological, economic and cultural change. By focusing on changes within the management of a single disease at the forefront of broader developments, Managing diabetes, managing medicine is able to tie together British developments across a number of sites at different scales of change, from the very local innovations of single towns to the debates of specialists and professional leaders at international levels. Drawing on a broad range of archival materials, published journals and textbooks, newspapers and oral histories, this book develops fresh insights into the history of managed healthcare, the NHS, and post-war government more broadly. Providing an important window onto crucial features of modern British medicine and society, it will be of interest to scholars and students across a range of historical, sociological and political scientific disciplines.