Sessions and workshops
We offer interactive sessions and workshops for a broad range of audiences, including Higher Education groups, schools, and informal adult groups. Sessions are held at the archives, and usually run for 90 minutes, and cover topics focusing on aspects of archives and heritage, as well as a number of historical topics, using material from our own collections. The current suite of sessions is listed below — contact us to discuss booking a session. For general group visits we suggest a donation of £3 per person.
Postgraduate
- Archive research methods
- The ethics of archival access to historical medical images
- Death and Dying in the 19th century
Undergraduate
- Hospitals through epidemic and pandemic
- Histories of nursing and social care
Schools and young people
- Working in archives and heritage
- History and history of medicine object handling — see details below
General audience
- Introduction to archival research
- Using our collections for family history research
- History of nursing at our hospitals
We may also sometimes develop sessions on a specific topic on request, or offer talks and sessions at other locations — please contact us to discuss requirements and charges for this service.
Handling collection
Our handling collection is specifically designed for public engagement and education. It consists of objects that users can handle and interact with in or outside the archives space, which are not subject to the same strict handling guidelines as the main collections, which are held in managed storage and accessed by appointment in the archives. The items in the handling collection are not required for the main collection, as they are duplicates, replicas, or do not fall under our collecting policy.
The handling collection is grouped into six themed sets of objects, as follows: Medieval and Tudor hospitals; Nursing; Surgery and Anaesthetics; Doctor’s bag; Pharmacy; Domestic medicine.
Handling objects can facilitate the development of many skills - observation, questioning, prediction, weighing of evidence, justifying proposals. Our handling boxes, which can be used come with supporting resources, including discovery cards on each object, and a pack with suggestions of creative and learning activities.
The activities support KS1 and KS2 students in developing key historical skills, including making connections, drawing contrasts, and creating structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses. The objects in our handling boxes also connect to key topics in the History of Medicine GSCE History module.
Contact us to book a guided or self-led session in the archives, or to discuss the use of the handling collection in your school.
Classroom resources — primary
KS2 lesson resource pack — Nine centuries of Healthcare
Our KS2 learning resource pack, based on the history of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and some of the fascinating items from the hospital's collections, is FREE to download. The pack is designed to introduce children to the story of the hospital’s nine-century history of healthcare – it is not necessary to visit the archives or St Bartholomew's Hospital Museum to use it. The pack supports cross-curricular learning, linking to English, Maths, Science and PSHE as well as supporting KS2 History teaching.
The pack can be used for a lesson covering the development of hospitals in the UK, as "an aspect or theme in British history that extends pupils’ chronological knowledge beyond 1066". This helps students put their own experiences of healthcare and hospitals in a wider historical context. Download the lesson pack here [pdf].
The pack consists of a Discovery sheet, highlighting facts and themes from the hospital’s story, and three Activity sheets. There is also an answer sheet providing sample answers to the Activity questions. We would like to thank the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths for their generous support for the development of the resource pack.
