A patient in Craigmillar told me of a friend of his in the early 1930s whose little daughter became extremely ill. He was far too poor to be able to call in a doctor or even to pay for a journey by bus.

"The only thing he could do was take his daughter in his arms and walk the five or six miles up to the royal infirmary. When he arrived there he found his daughter was dead."

These are the words of Sir John Crofton, the Scotland-based doctor whose treatment for TB helped save millions of lives.

They recall the desperation faced by families before the creation of the NHS across the UK on July 5, 1948.

Only the determined work of politicians such as Labour health minister Aneurin Bevan and pioneers such as Crofton have consigned distressing images like this to history.

It is questionable whether the necessary political and public support could be fostered to create NHS Scotland - which now costs more than £10bn a year - from scratch today.

In the 1940s, however, there was the public appetite. The works of Scottish novelist Archibald Joseph Cronin, who created the character Dr Finlay, were immensely popular. His 1937 title The Citadel, about corruption in the medical establishment, became an Oscar- nominated film. Cronin and Bevan worked in the same south Wales mining community in the 1920s, although there is no evidence the two met.

Bevan, who married Fifer Jennie Lee, had strong links with Scotland. He was friends with Gorbals MP George Buchanan and his brother Dr John Buchanan, a GP covering Gorbals and Govan.

"Nye had the power but not the practical knowledge that this doctor in Wales and daddy had of the difficulties and hardships that people endured as they did not have the money for proper medical help," recalls Ann Buchanan, Dr Buchanan's daughter.

Bevan was "a very genial uncle figure", she says. "He and Jennie did not have children and I kind of had the feeling from my mother that Nye would have liked children because he was immensely fond of me.

"I remember being small and being put in a clean dress and white socks because he was coming for lunch with daddy. I would be taken in with coffee and sweeties and have to say a little poem."

The selflessness of those men as they put the world to rights impressed Ms Buchanan. She says her parents were short of cash as her father wouldn't charge the poor for his time or see a sick child ail without medication when the family had no money. His was not the only practice providing treatment for free.

Scotland took the first bold steps towards state-funded healthcare in 1913 when it set up the Highlands and Islands Medical Service. Unique at the time, it paid doctors. There was also a growing range of voluntary and municipal hospitals that did not charge, but they relied on charity. Before the NHS began, the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh ran an annual deficit in excess of £40,000.

The state of Scottish health services was reviewed in the 1930s by Glasgow University professor Edward Cathcart and his recommendations about educating people to develop healthy habits and instincts have a familiar ring today. Unlike Bevan, who saw the money for the NHS coming from taxation, Cathcart recommended an extension of the existing workers' insurance system to pay for his vision, but his report still helped breed the consensus necessary to deliver state-funded care, cradle to grave.

According to Ronald Fraser, assistant private secretary to the Secretary of State for Scotland in the 1940s: "If Nye Bevan had not existed, we in Scotland would have found ourselves carried into a National Health Service just as we were in 1948."

Indeed the separate Scottish NHS Bill, ready two years earlier, was delayed in case it caused problems for Bevan south of the border where its birth was somewhat more problematic.

Outraged at the prospect of doctors becoming state employees, the British Medical Association mounted vitriolic opposition. In the final ballot of May 1948, GPs and hospital doctors in Scotland voted in favour. English counterparts remained against.

As July 5 approached, Arthur Woodburn, Secretary of State for Scotland, wrote to all "fellow Scots" describing the day as an "important milestone" - perhaps on reflection something of an understatement. "Every man, woman and child can have the benefit of this service," he said.

The then Glasgow Herald hailed its arrival with a lead story.

"More than 400 hospitals, with almost 65,000 beds, pass to state ownership," it said. The editorial was more sceptical. While noting the pride the nation might take in leading the world, it warned: "A noble experiment is in desperate danger of being bungled through inexperience and haste."

Sixty years on, the NHS still has its share of cost problems and inefficiencies, but no politician is seriously advocating its demise.