“History matters—pass it on” was the slogan of a campaign launched in England in the summer of 2006 to raise public awareness of the huge contribution that history, heritage and the built environment make to our qualify of life. A resumé commented,

It unites the whole heritage sector, led by the National Trust, English Heritage, the Historic Houses Association and the Heritage Lottery Fund, and events will be held over the next six months at hundreds of historic locations across England and Wales. Supporters include David Starkey, Tristram Hunt, Simon Thurley, Stephen Fry, Bill Bryson, Shami Chakrabarti, Tony Benn and Boris Johnson.

The relationship between medicine and the study of life is as old as medicine itself. Nevertheless, historians have highlighted the great transformation that took place in the nineteenth century when first physiology and then bacteriology became important resources for the classification, diagnosis, and treatment of human diseases. In that period, significant links developed between the sites specializing in biological experimentation (i.e. laboratories) on the one hand, and the places of healing (i.e. hospitals, dispensaries) and public health offices on the other. Together, they helped to fashion modern, professional medicine. However, many historical studies have also argued that this mobilization of biological knowledge exerted a limited impact on medical practice in general, and clinical practice in particular.

The National Health Service (NHS) has often been regarded, by both academic commentators and the public, as the centrepiece of Britain's welfare state. It has retained a high degree of popularity, and politicians have had to take account of this, privately and publicly. So, for example, in the late 1950s a leading Conservative observed that the electorate might accept cuts in defence spending: “But meddle with National Health? That's political suicide.” A quarter of a century later Margaret Thatcher felt obliged to declare at the Conservative Party annual conference that “the National Health Service is safe with us”. The Labour Party has been particularly keen to associate itself with the NHS, playing on its central role in the service's creation. At the 2001 general election, for instance, the manifesto of the Scottish Labour Party proclaimed that: “For over 50 years, the NHS has been part and parcel of what it means to be British. Its foundations—tax-based funding and care according to need—remain as valid today as ever.” In doing so, it stressed the service's founding principles alongside the assertion that it is a central component of British identity.

It has become commonplace in accounts of medicine in the second half of the twentieth-century to ascribe an “antibiotic revolution” to the years when penicillin became widely available from the early 1950s. However, to date there have been hardly any studies that demonstrate a major discontinuity in medical practices after mid-century, let alone that go on to specify their character. There would seem to be two key features of any “antibiotic revolution”: first and foremost that the treatment of diseases was transformed as doctors were able to cure illness caused by infections with specific drugs that eliminated causative bacteria; and second that the ambition of doctors to intervene with drugs in a number of diseases grew, as did the ability of the pharmaceutical industry to supply an increasing range of targeted and effective remedies. In this article we contribute towards an assessment of the first of these key features by discussing the changing management of acute bronchitis from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s. The disease was amongst the most prevalent and important of that period in Britain, being the single largest cause of consultations with general practitioners (GPs) through much of the 1950s. Bronchitis was also the subject of many high profile debates among doctors and health care agencies as concerns about its morbidity and mortality touched on such issues as smoke pollution, the costs of the National Health Service (NHS) and changes in the doctor–patient relationship. The evidence of contemporary studies shows that the treatment of acute bronchitis changed radically after the introduction of antibiotics, such that by the mid-1950s over 80 per cent of patients diagnosed with the condition were prescribed penicillin or another antibacterial drug—a shift that was not supported by any clinical trials or systematic evidence. How and why this change occurred are the questions we set out to answer.