Hello, welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service.

We are taking you back to post-war Britain, when on the same day that the National Health Service was born,

John Marx qualified as a doctor. In 2009, he spoke to Louise Hidalgo.

It's 1948, three years after the end of the Second World War, and Britain is on the cusp of a social revolution.

Tomorrow, they will come into operation, the most comprehensive system of social security ever introduced into any country.

The aim is to ensure that the provision of proper care and treatment shall not depend on financial resources.

And that when you are sick, you will be free from the money worries which the orphan company illness.

And so one of the cornerstones of the new post-war Britain was laid, free healthcare for all, the National Health Service,

or the NHS as it became known, was born.

I remember that the news broadcast in the morning when the news read and said today is a great day for British medicine.

And he was talking about the NHS, we started at a minute after midnight.

I was thinking about my final results, which would do you out at 6 o'clock that night.

The same day that the NHS came into being, a young Londoner, John Marx, became one of the first students to pass their medical exams and to qualify as doctors in the new system.

And that night at 6 o'clock, I and 119 others qualified as doctors, the first doctors in the new NHS.

I qualified on the 5th of July, I reached on the 14th, on the 16th, I presented myself an old hospital I've been a student at.

I said, I've qualified, they said, how would you like to do a locom?

And I said, yes, please, when do I start? They said, now?

And that night, I and Lisa dies a 90-year-old man who didn't die, really had died. Nobody would care too much except me.

But the birth of the NHS was not without controversy. The British Medical Association, the Trade Body for Doctors, had mounted a vigorous campaign to try to stop it, arguing that the new system would turn doctors into civil servants.

In my view, the services of this country are good. They're continually improving. I admit they lack coordination and that they overlap and have certain disadvantages.

But in my view, all these can easily be remedied by organisation. Now, why should we interfere with so good a thing and convert it into a branch of the civil service in order to obtain the better organisation necessary to prevent overlapping and bring certain services more easily within the reach of the people?

There wasn't great enthusiasm where I was. Yes, they liked the idea of not charging people, but you know, you didn't have to wrap people's money before giving them treatment.

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