Investigating Children’s Health

The pack provides material for a unit of work in its own right or an historical dimension to ongoing Citizenship/PSHE work. It is intended to give children the opportunity to examine, question and draw tentative conclusions of their own from a range of historical sources, mostly pictorial. These are accompanied by stories assembled from written sources and some oral history.

Children will develop chronological skills and learn simple techniques for examining historical documents carefully. Ideas of change and continuity will be explored through comparisons between eras and with health practice today. Children will be encouraged to engage imaginatively and creatively with the historical material, form their own ideas and justify these. There are also opportunities to collect oral histories from older relatives and friends.

Each activity is introduced with background notes for teachers. It is up to their professional judgment how much of this they share with children, but it should give enough information to answer questions or to start further inquiries. The activities are suggestions only. The most important elements of this pack are the source material and the opportunity for children to investigate this, become fascinated and discuss their own ideas. The language levels required vary greatly. Most of the activities can be based on visual material alone with the teacher providing factual information or narratives in ways appropriate to their classes.

The nature of this area of history means that some of the material is rather disturbing. The terms used in the past to describe the poor and particularly the mentally ill are, to our minds unsympathetic and downright cruel. This is valuable discussion to be had with children. Most activities have a contemporary dimension to enable children to see that health care for children has improved enormously in the developed world. Care should of course be taken not to cause anxiety or fear.

The pack falls broadly into two parts with slightly different approaches:

• Part 1: Going to hospital, focuses on institutional care largely in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Four case study stories are presented about four different hospitals, The Foundling Hospital, Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, Normansfield, a private institution to care for people with mental and physical disabilities, and hospital ships that quarantined smallpox sufferers. This section ends with an investigation into the benefits of fresh air and open-air schools.

• Part 2: The doctor comes to school – and the nurse and the dentist, looks at the rise of school and community based health care in the twentieth century. These investigations are largely picture based and encourage the use of oral history to gather the experiences of the older people that the children know. This should make the experience of historical investigation more immediate, more personal and essentially more democratic i.e. ‘history is about me and is done by me!’