By Gareth Jones - Published by Old Bakehouse Publications - 1998Hardback with Dust Jacket - 244 pages - 252 mm x 172 mm
Over 200 Black & White Photographs.
This book tells the graphic story of how the voluntary hospitals in the Blaenau Gwent coal mining and steel making valleys came about in the early years of the twentieth century. Workmen's Medical Aid Societies were established in the valley towns in the 1870s to provide medical and, later, surgical treatment free at the point of need. Aneurin Bevan was Chairman of the Tredegar Hospital Management Committee.
In 1948, the hospitals became part of the National Health Service. Then began the long battle to determine where the new acute hospital should be built. Fortunately, the Blaina and District Hospital, in 1920, had bought the Nevill Hall Mansion House, Abergavenny, and 25 acres of parkland to serve as a convalescent home.
The final chapter of the book describes what has been achieved when, after twenty years of dependence on Gwent Health Authority, the Hospital Trust was established which enabled Nevill Hall, once again, in the tradition of Aneurin Bevan, to give priority to the needs of the people of Blaenau Gwent, north Monmouthshire and south Powys - as had happened seventy years earlier.