“The surgeon’s quick thinking saved my life”: Emilia Clarke, Paul McCartney and others on their hospital dramas

I believe my first real memory of my beloved NHS is of the kindness of a nurse when, as a very sugar-dependent three-year-old, I’d climbed to the top of the bathroom cabinet and devoured an entire jar of sugary multivitamins under the cover of night-time. She very calmly told my slightly overwrought and worried mother that once the sugar high had worn off, there would be no lasting damage and that I would indeed be fit to fight another nursery day, and then some. The memories I will hold dearest, though, are ones that fill me with awe: of the nurses and doctors I knew by name when, in the weeks after my first brain haemorrhage, we watched the passing of time and the passing