In 1951, the government’s Crown Film Unit released the film Life in Her Hands. Starring Kathleen Byron, best known for her role as a nun in Black Narcissus (1946), Life in Her Hands was an ambitious hour-long recruitment film, designed to attract women to the nursing profession.

It was part of a wider national recruitment campaign to address the chronic shortage of qualified nurses in post-war Britain, one of the most explicit examples of positive NHS propaganda in the service’s early years. It was also part of a boom in popular culture with medical themes. While clinical characters had appeared in Victorian crime novels and in early twentieth-century satirical fiction (most famously The Citadel), it was only after the NHS’s founding that healthcare professionals became popular celebrities.

In the early 1950s, the prolific publishing house Mills & Boon launched a new sub-genre: the Doctor–Nurse romance. Mostly featuring a chaste love affair between a female nurse and male doctor (although later iterations sometimes subverted that professional and gender dynamic), and set in NHS hospitals, these novels portrayed nurses as the ideal British heroine  — a position which came with advantages and drawbacks.

The substantial increases in healthcare spending and major advances in biomedicine that took place in 1950s Britain were accompanied by a new kind of television programme: the healthcare drama, sometimes referred to as a ‘carbolic soap opera’. An early example was Emergency Ward 10, shown on ITV from 1957 to 1967.

The series was set in the fictional Oxbridge General and was the first hospital-based television series to establish a successful format combining medical matters with storylines centring on the personal lives of doctors and nurses. While American audi- ences had been introduced to a television adaptation of The Citadel by the 1960s, it wasn’t until the 1980s that British audiences would see its UK equivalent, alongside shows like Casualty and The District Nurse, which emerged as successors to Emergency Ward 10.

Cultural products of the era were designed to persuade the public, and particularly women, of the value of medicine. They had female audiences in mind, and rarely strayed far from melodrama, romance, and sentimentality. However, they were also all invested in authenticity. Women healthcare professionals were presented as skilled as well as emotionally adept, and writers and producers did not shy away from the realities of clinical labour.

Life in Her Hands and other examples from the 1950s reflected, embedded, and created stereotypes of doctors and nurses that have proven remarkably enduring. Indeed, the status that doctors and nurses enjoy today  — valued by the public, if not the government, as key workers — is partly a testament to the success of medical popular culture.

Fiction, film, and TV dramas from the post-war era painted a picture of hospital life as rigidly hierarchical and male-dominated. Diligence, subordination, and resilience were presented as crucial characteristics, even job requirements, for junior doctors and nurses alike. Nursing specifically was a vocation demanding commitment: rewarding, but not without cost.

From the government’s perspective, Life in Her Hands proved remarkably successful. In 1954, the junior health minister Patricia Hornsby-Smith informed Parliament that they had recruited 35,000 nurses between December 1948 and September 1953, a 27% increase.

But it wasn’t long before the image of the self-sacrificing nurse began to undermine the profession. In 1971, Pamela M. Jefferies, a nursing sister, penned an article for the British Medical Journal describing how the profession had slowly ‘deteriorated’, from comprising a group of people ‘who appeared secure to one in which there is in evidence much restlessness, distress, and gross insecurity’. In the decades afterwards, NHS workers would wage historic strikes.

Today, conditions are worse again  — and the recruitment crisis is as severe as it has been at any time since the post-war era. There are no shortage of medical dramas, although their ability to entice workers to serve in the NHS waned long ago. Cultural representation has its place but also its limits: nothing, in the end, substitutes for a dignified workplace.