World War One Sources
In today’s lesson, we started by showing you these two sources from a GCSE History exam question. One source was an account written by a chaplain who was looking after men in World War One, and one was a diary entry from an army surgeon. As you can see below, both accounts are deeply moving…
Giving and Receiving: The Discovery of Blood Types
In today’s lesson, we started by showing you the artefact below, and asked you what you thought it was. Some of you noted that it contained glass tubes, and wondered if it was connected to taking blood pressure. A couple of you got it right – it is in fact a portable blood transfusion kit…
Shrapnel and Shovels: Exploring World War One and Medicine through Artefacts
In today’s lesson, we started by asking you to put the key events of World War One in order. You had learned these for homework, so you first put them into order in paper strips in pairs, and then wrote them into your books from memory. We then asked you what you thought the most…
How World War One is Remembered and How It Changed Medicine
In today’s lesson, after your assessment on why life expectancy has changed since the 1900s, we started our new topic of the First World War and its connection to the history of medicine. We began by looking at this image of an installation at the Tower of London and discussing the symbol of the poppy,…
What Ten Objects Tell us About Life Expectancy since 1900
In today’s lesson, we started by telling you about a writing assignment that you will be doing in our first lesson back after the Easter break: “Why has life expectancy gone up so much since 1900?”. The assessment will be open book, and at the end of this blog post you will find holiday tasks…
The Discovery of DNA
In our double lesson on Monday 22nd March, we started by showing this short video which explains what DNA is. We then introduced you to a bead activity involving making the DNA strand of a particular living thing following a set of instructions. You chose a range of animals, from flesh-eating microbes to cobras and…
Exploring Antibiotic Resistance
In our lesson on Friday 19th, we continued our exploration of the discovery of penicillin by looking back at this prophetic statement made by Alexander Fleming in his 1945 speech when he was awarded the Nobel Prize: “The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger…
Bedpans and Bacteria: The Discovery of Penicillin
In today’s lesson, we started by showing you a quote by Louis Pasteur that was particularly relevant to our topic, “chance only favours the prepared mind”. We then introduced our mystery object. You recognised very quickly that it was a bedpan, a piece of equipment used especially in hospitals but also other settings for people…
Profit versus Public Health: The History of Smoking Research and Advertising
In our (hopefully!) final virtual lesson, we started by asking you to define capitalism and communism. Many of you noted that capitalism is a system where private companies offer goods and services to individual consumers, whereas communism is a system where everything is owned and run by the government. We live in a bit of…
Tobacco and Advertising: Your Virtual Galleries
In today’s lesson, we asked each of you to select some examples of cigarette packaging and advertising and create your own mini-gallery, where you labelled and explained the items you chose, and what they told us about the intentions of the company who made them. See below for your galleries! Gallery 1: Gallery 2: 1900s-1940s:…
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History of Medicine in 30 Objects 