The art of medicine: Thinking in time: does health policy need history as evidence?

The British health adviser Lord Darzi's promotion of polyclinics, for example, spoke of antecedents in revolutionary Russia, but did not allude to the more recent British history of the health centre as the intended fulcrum of the early National Health Service (NHS), the lynchpin of coordination between the diff erent arms of the service, which never took off . Do politicians and commentators know that health services were once located and managed within local government, or that public health personnel were the intended coordinators of primary care at the local level? [...] debates about social policy, the family, adoption, lone motherhood, are regularly informed by a type of folk history and beliefs about past patterns of family life that bear little relation to the conclusions from evidence which have been drawn by historians.