Despite being primarily financed by taxpayers, many hospitals in the British National Health Service also draw on significant sums raised by charitable trusts. This partly reflects the longer history of hospital care in Britain, where many hospitals began as voluntary organisations financed by philanthropy, but also major changes in funding, especially since the great financial crisis of 2008 and ‘austerity’ policies during the 2010s.

Martin begins with general historical background on the transition from voluntary to public hospital funding at the start of the NHS, and the new role for charity under the state system post-1948. Drawing on previous analysis of archived websites to write twenty-first-century histories of medicine, Martin presents research on some hospital charitable trusts in London, including Barts, Great Ormond Street, Guy’s St Thomas’s and King’s, to show how these organisations have been using their websites to fundraise and communicate their charitable works.

Martin Gorsky is Professor of the History of Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.