NHS’s first patient recalls his experiences

The first patient ever treated under the NHS, Dennis Carey, has been reliving his memories of a tough post-war London childhood. Carey was the first patient, but as he received his treatment abroad, he has usually been overlooked, with attention instead falling on Sylvia Diggory, who as a 13-year-old shook Aneurin Bevan's (above right, with Clement Attlee) hand from her Manchester hospital bed at the official launch of the scheme.

The NHS came into being at the stroke of midnight as July 5, 1948 began – and from that moment exactly, it began to pay the bills for Dennis Carey's treatment for asthma at a Swiss clinic.

Carey came from a working-class family of heavy smokers, but at that time doctors did not realise that it was the smoke in his Bermondsey family home that was causing his asthma attacks, blaming them instead on smog or damp from the Thames.

A clinic at Leysin in the Alps was seen as his last chance. Though the idea of a working-class kid being sent to a Swiss sanatorium was unheard of, Carey was desperately ill, and a local councilor arranged for him to go, and for the council to foot the bill.

But it took the intervention of his local MP to have the payments made by the NHS when the council’s limited support ran out. Speaking in the Commons, Bob Mellish MP asked if it would be fitting for the birth of the NHS to be overshadowed by the death of a young boy – he won the day.

Carey told the Financial Times: "Everyone in the neighbourhood was proud I'd been the first person treated on the NHS – tradesmen, shopkeepers... If I had come back before I was better it would have been fatal."