H&P encourages historians to use their expertise to shed light on issues of the day. If you are interested in submitting an opinion piece for publication, please see our editorial guidelines. We currently have 335 Opinion Articles listed by date and they are all freely searchable by theme, author or keyword.
In May 2024, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Birth Trauma published their report, ‘Listen to Mums: Ending the Postcode Lottery on Perinatal Care’. It raised concerns about a range of issues including inadequate resourcing of midwifery, maternal mental health, and post-natal services, racial and ethnic disparities in health outcomes and the economic costs of birth injuries. This policy article notes there have been complaints about maternity care since the inception of the NHS. It suggests we need to think about birth trauma in the broadest possible terms: as reflecting issues with culture, relationships, and power, as well as related issues of understaffing and underfunding.
The policies of the major parties on health are likely to be fiercely debated in the course of the current general election. But what can be learned from British health policy in the past for those trying to improve it in the present? Two of the editors of a recent report for the British Academy, Lessons from the History of British Health Policy offer some answers.
Loneliness is discussed as a key effect of the pandemic, but David Vincent points out that the problem pre-dates Covid-19 and there is little evidence yet that the crisis has made things worse
Thucydides' account of the Athenian plague and its social disruption has been heavily drawn upon during today's pandemic, as Neville Morley explains. Yet Thucydides was not offering immutable laws of human behaviour – and there are aspects of today's social norms around Covid-19 that he might have approved.
Mrunmayee Satam shows that mortality rates in the influenza epidemic of 1918-19 differed startlingly by caste in Mumbai, and the same risks remain today in the city's most congested quarters, where social distancing and self-quarantine is all but impossible
John Henderson finds some familiar features of the current lockdown situation in early modern Italy - and some compassionate, charity-driven behaviour.
The Second World War blackout offers us a close analogy to the Covid-19 lockdown, say Henry Irving and Marc Wiggam – complete with flouting of the rules, and opposition to its being lifted.
1942 saw the nadir of the war, but also the publication of the Beveridge Report and a profound national discussion on what postwar society should be like, says Lucy Noakes. What should we change in a post-Covid future?
In a globalised world, new pathogens made their way to Britain and killed thousands, while a social security system depleted for ideological motives failed to cope. Not today, but the 1830s and 1840s, says Simon Szreter.
Supply chain inadequacies and agricultural worker shortages - the Covid crisis is highlighting the lack of a coherent and integrated national food policy, say John Martin and James P. Bowen
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