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History Detectives – discover medicine through time - Warwickshire Heritage Learning

Workshop title

History Detectives – discover medicine through time

Key stage 2
Delivered at

Warwickshire County Record Office, Warwick

Duration 2 hours
Curriculum topics

History, English

Main focus

Interpretation and inference, historical sources, difference and significance.

Workshop outline

Investigate original documents at Warwickshire County Record Office and tour the strongrooms where they are stored. A mixed collection of documents are available to be examined allowing for different learning styles and abilities; photographs, birth and death registers from parish records, hospital records, handwritten household recipe books with recipes and cures for illnesses, newspaper articles and adverts.

Documents will allow you to discuss a range of themes with your class, such as what types of illness there were in the past, what people believed caused illnesses, treatments available and how these were funded before the NHS. The majority of the documents come from the Victorian period with a few from earlier periods. Pupils are given guidance on handling the documents and short exercises to help them learn to look and see the details in the source material.

You are encouraged to bring your own class camera to record details from your favourite documents to use back in the classroom.

Key skills covered
  • Chronological understanding
  • Drawing conclusions about life in the past from different sources of information.
  • Interpretation – talk about the types of written and visual evidence that exists in archives to tell us about the past.
  • Historic enquiry – comparing/contrasting information, identifying and analysing evidence.
  • Questioning evidence
  • Group working
  • Empathy with people living in the past
  • Comparison with conditions in the past to today
Booking information

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