‘Who can tell what the future brings?’ Cruel optimism and poster children in Great Ormond Street Hospital’s 1987–1989 Wishing Well Campaign

Bibliographic Data

ID19477243
AuthorsHarry James Caton (0009-0004-8370-9564, University of Exeter, corresponding author)
Year2026
Pagesmedhum-2025-013566
Publication date2026-06-15
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMedical Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1468-215X • E-ISSN: 1473-4265
PublisherBMJ (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1136/medhum-2025-013566
PMID42303284
OpenAlexW7164917637
LanguageEN
References cited26

The Thatcherite 1980s saw in Britain the reversal of many taken-for-granted social compacts regarding community and care. Amidst a broader economic downturn and stagnating state funding, few institutions felt this apparent decline in welfare standards quite as much as the National Health Service. A prelude to the more substantial neoliberal reorganisation of the system that would occur under the Major government, the period nonetheless saw a newfound reliance on the private sector and charitable outreach as a means of supplementing increasingly meagre resources. Drawing upon extensive archival research, contemporary press coverage and publicity materials, I look at the first large-scale healthcare fundraiser in the history of the service: Great Ormond Street Hospital’s 1987–1989 Wishing Well campaign. Developed by the struggling children’s hospital, I argue that Wishing Well served to legitimise, both rhetorically and economically, a highly contingent form of fundraising—the charitable appeal—via a resource for which it did not lack: children. Through the lens of Lauren Berlant’s theory of ‘cruel optimism’, I investigate the use of a figure that made countless demands of futurity, care and the overcoming of impairment as they specifically related to childhood. By positioning these poster children as the naive, compromised dependents of a giving public, the sympathetic response was individualised, each act of compassion sustaining an idea of futurity that is itself highly precarious. Their childishness was critical to the venture. Lee Edelman argues that the child has been used throughout modernity to enforce compulsory, future-tense narrative stability; in turn, I note that the ideological requirement for children to ‘grow up’ he highlights has itself been similarly conflated with their need to ‘grow out’ of ill health. Though hitched to the presumption of an able-normative future, these poster children nonetheless exist in tension with their own precarious present—if not to overcome, then endure

Compassion · Ideology · Narrative · Optimism · Outreach · Publicity · State (computer science) · Thatcherism · Welfare · Children's Rights and Participation · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Political and Economic history of UK and US

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