The archives of the Royal Free Hospital and London School of Medicine for Women were transferred to London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) in 2013 following the closure of the Royal Free Hospital Archive Service. The Royal Free Hospital began life as a small dispensary in Holborn providing free medical care to those who could not afford it. The title ‘Royal’ was granted by Queen Victoria in 1837 in recognition of the hospital’s work during the nineteenth century cholera epidemics. Demand for free hospital treatment was high that in 1844 the Royal Free Hospital moved to larger premises in Gray’s Inn Road where it stayed until the 1970s, when it moved to its current site in Hampstead. The hospital is notable not only as the first free hospital in London, but also as the first in Britain to accept women as students. It was also the first to appoint an almoner (forerunner of the social worker), and pioneered treatments for kidney and liver diseases, haemophilia and cancer. The archives contain some of the earliest surviving patient case notes including those by the first women surgeons and physicians. In 2015 the Wellcome Trust awarded LMA a Research Resources in Medical History grant for a year-long project to repair and refurbish fragile and damaged items to enable physical access to items within the archives unavailable for research owing to their poor condition, and to repackage the archives to ensure their long-term preservation. It also funded a 12-month public engagement programme to promote the project within the academic and non-academic communities and build themes from the collection into LMA’s schools and outreach programmes. This pack consists investigations into the archives of the Royal Free Hospital and the NHS today. The enquiries deal in various ways with the development of healthcare for the poor and the developing roles of women in health professions particularly as doctors and almoners in the later nineteenth century. These investigations provide ways of exploring social reform, the history of medicine in the nineteenth century, and local history. They could be undertaken in three substantial lessons or broken up over a longer scheme of work to suit students’ needs. They can be used together or separately to provide experiences of source-based enquiry using the kinds of materials usually found in archives. Teachers and students are considered as co-investigators with the teacher in a facilitative role, using their experience to guide investigation and questioning and taking care to appreciate and challenge students’ conclusions as a critical friend. These are investigations into history not accounts of the past. There are, therefore no teachers’ notes as such.

Between 1700 and 1900, Britain stopped punishing the bodies of convicts and increasingly sought to exile them and/or reform their minds. Exile and forced labour in Australia and incarceration in penitentiaries became the dominant modes of punishment. This exhibition uses the collections of the London Metropolitan Archives and findings of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Digital Panopticon project to trace the impact of these changes on convict lives. This education pack includes a guide to the exhibition narrative, a series of worksheets, a time-line and further reading suggestions. It has been put together to provide teachers and educators with a series of resources that can be used in a group visit by GCSE and AS/A-Level students to the exhibition. The worksheets have been designed to meet the needs of EdExcel/Pearson, OCR, and WJEC Eduqas GCSE syllabuses and EdExcel A-Level History curricula. These courses all address the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century development of crime and punishment in the UK and transportation to Australia.

This series of resources contains information for teachers on the historical background to the issuing of the Magna Carta and suggestions for cross-curricular classroom activities on the history and contemporary significance of the Magna Carta. You can find a selection of digital doucumets on LMA’s catalogue by following this link: https://tinyurl.com/yb7rcusa Curriculum links The resources have been created by LMA to support the teaching of the National Curriculum. Links to specific subjects’ curricula are detailed below. Art: Students should be able to analyse and evaluate their own work, and that of others, in order to strengthen the visual impact or applications of their work. Citizenship Students should: Understand the development of the political system of democratic government in the United Kingdom, including the roles of citizens, Parliament and the monarch Be equipped with the skills to think critically and debate political questions, to enable them to manage their money on a day-to-day basis, and plan for future financial needs. English Students should: Be able to read easily, fluently and with good understanding Be able to write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences Be able to use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas Be competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate. History Students should achieve an understanding of: The development of Church, state and society in Medieval Britain 1066 - 1509 Magna Carta and the emergence of Parliament Medieval society, economy and culture: for example, feudalism, religion in daily life (parishes, monasteries, abbeys), farming, trade and towns (especially the wool trade), art, architecture and literature.

Robert Hooke (1635 – 1703) was a renowned scientist and in 1665 he published a book called ‘Micrographia’. The book is full of beautiful drawings of creatures and plants seen through the microscope. LMA looks after Robert Hooke’s diary, which has been made part of the UNESCO UK Memory of the World register and there will be an introduction to Hooke and his diary during the day. Read the diary here: https://search.lma.gov.uk/scripts/mwimain.dll/144/LMA_OPAC/web_detail/REFD+CLC~2F495~2FMS01758?SESSIONSEARCH&utm_source=lma&utm_medium=website&utm_content=robert-hooke&utm_campaign=news#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0&z=-0.5992%2C-0.0835%2C2.1985%2C1.6701 Micrographia was a revelation - a new world! A creature normally known only as a speck that bites is made familiar in every detail. We can view its anatomy with our normal eyesight! What microscopes revealed to Robert Hooke was that even the tiniest creatures were made up of lots of different strange parts. We’re going to make our own parts and put them together to make our own strange creatures! Robert Hooke’s major contribution to 17th century scientific research and London architecture is clearly revealed in his diary. Kept as a memorandum book to remind him of the many places he had been and people he had met each day, along with his pithy thoughts and observations about scientific research and the world around him, the diary offers an unparalleled glimpse into the exciting and vibrant world of restoration scientific discovery and the rebuilding of London from the ashes of the Great Fire. Hooke did not intend his diary to be read by anyone else, so he could be candid in his observations about himself and his contemporaries. The diary shows a man striving to be open and honest with himself. He found his body and habits to be worthy of investigation and research, so he noted his symptoms and the experimental, sometimes dangerous, medicines he self-administered. Famed for his irascibility and scientific rows, the evidence of the diary suggests he was often both gregarious (with many evenings in taverns and coffee houses recorded) and collaborative - working closely and amiably with many colleagues, especially Sir Christopher Wren. At other times he confided in the diary his bitter feelings towards scientists whom he believed had stolen his ideas and inventions or deliberately under represented his achievements and contribution. Entries in the diary have allowed historians to cast light on these painful rows and also to investigate the diverse lines of enquiry he was pursuing in many different fields of knowledge.

This pack introduces teachers and young people to the amazingly rich life of Cy Grant and his ground-breaking work campaigning for human rights and racial equality. Barrister, war veteran, actor, singer-songwriter, broadcaster and multi-ethnic arts co-ordinator Cy dedicated his life to the pursuit of excellence and to using his celebrity and artistic and spiritual insight for the good of others.

Based on the Eric and Jessica Huntley Archive, this rich and powerful collection of materials covers fifty years of Black History in London. Discover the work of pioneering campaigners and education workers in the Black community and learn about the experience of migrating to London in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The pack also focuses on the wide cultural life which grew up around Bogle-L’Ouverture, the Huntleys’ London publishing house and bookshop.

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!’

This education session is designed to explore and celebrate the work of Joseph Bazalgette, arguably the most significant engineer of the nineteenth century and certainly the engineer who has had most impact on the lives of Londoners up to the present day. There are different enquiries and extension activities, using a wide range of historical sources and featuring creative responses, citizenship considerations, brief historical backgrounds and primary sources. The structure of each enquiry is only a suggestion with sufficient flexibility to enable teachers to adjust them to suit their own learning outcomes. The pack can support any investigation of nineteenth century urban life, as it covers such broad themes as civic government, planning, health and engineering. Please contact us for more information and available dates. History ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain, 1745-1901 a study of a significant society or issue in world history and its interconnections with other world developments Citizenship the roles played by public institutions and voluntary groups in society, and the ways in which citizens work together to improve their communities, including opportunities to participate in school-based activities the different ways in which a citizen can contribute to the improvement of their community, to include the opportunity to participate actively in community volunteering, as well as other forms of responsible activity Geography Human and physical geography - understand, through the use of detailed place-based exemplars at a variety of scales, the key processes in human geography relating to population and urbanisation; international development; economic activity in the primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary sectors; and the use of natural resources Science Scientific attitudes - understand that scientific methods and theories develop as earlier explanations are modified to take account of new evidence and ideas, together with the importance of publishing results and peer review The development of scientific thinking - explaining everyday and technological applications of -science; evaluating associated personal, social, economic and environmental implications; and making decisions based on the evaluation of evidence and arguments Topic: Biology - Health, disease and the development of medicines

A selection of scanned documents from LMA’s collection.

A selection of scanned documents