Learning and Access

'Why do you ask me a question, by the way of solving it, why think, why not try the experiment'?

This was John Hunter’s response to his student Edward Jenner when asked by him for the cause of a failed experiment. He urged his student to try the experiment again to find the answer.

The museum supports its founder's practical approach to learning and is committed to providing the widest possible access to its collections for all its visitors.

• Secondary Schools
• Universities and HE Colleges
• The MacRae Gallery: Room to Discover
• Learning for Life
• Families and children
• School Holiday activities

Secondary Schools

Latest news

The Cutting Edge Career workshops are fully booked for the 2009-10 school year. If you would like to receive information about 2010-11 workshops please email museums@rcseng.ac.uk with the words 'School workshop dates request' as the subject, and we will send you details of the these events once they have been confirmed.

Remaining dates for 2009-2010 Medicine through Time workshops (Year 10 and 11) are listed below:

Friday 11 June	Thursday 1 July
Friday 18 June	Friday 9 July

For more information or to book please contact the Learning and Events Officer on 020 7869 6566

GCSE Medicine through Time

A visit to the Hunterian Museum will bring the Medicine through Time syllabus to life for students. Our new workshop is directly linked to the OCR/Edexcel/AQA GCSE curriculum and encourages students to explore the Hunterian Museum and the College library and archive collections to build their knowledge and understanding of the key developments in the history of surgery and medicine.

Working in small groups the students will use original objects from the museum's handling collections, library and archive source materials together with the objects and specimens on display in the museum to create a personalised tour that focuses on a particular element in the development of surgery, medicine and healthcare.

While creating their tours students will encounter key objects linked to the lives of leading surgical and medical figures featured in the GCSE course including Ambroise Pare, Robert Liston, Joseph Lister and James Young Simpson, giving the students a chance to learn more about the medical advances that they contributed to.

Classes of up to 30 students can attend this free workshop.  Schools can choose between a morning session from 10.30am-12.45pm or an afternoon session from 1.00-2.45pm.

Dates are listed above and you can download a pdf flyer with all the dates and session information. For more information or to book please contact the Learning and Events Officer on 020 7869 6566.

You can download a teachers guide to the Medicine through Time visit which will give you more information about the content and format of the workshop, a brief history of the museum and the College, as well as classroom activities to introduce your students to the Hunterian Museum and its collections before their visit.

'A cutting edge career' - surgical skills workshops for Year 11 and 12 students

Do your students want to go to medical or dental school?

Are they in the process of applying and need something extra for their personal statements?

Would they benefit from some tips for the interview?

You can combine a visit to the museum with an opportunity for your students to learn some basic surgical skills and the chance to find out more about a career in medicine, surgery and dentistry.

Working in small groups under the expert guidance of surgeons and medical students your pupils can get to grips with the essential skills needed in suturing and knot tying. This is an excellent opportunity for them find out more about life at medical and dental school, as well as to ask questions about applying to university and to gain some tips about the interview. They can also talk to surgeons about different surgical specialties and the range of careers open to them in medicine, surgery and dentistry.

The surgical skills workshops are organised in conjunction with the Opportunities in Surgery department of the Royal College of Surgeons. 

For further information please contact the learning and events officer on 020 7869 6566.

A visible difference: skin, race and identity - a citizenship resource pack

The museum collections are a record of people who were alive hundreds and thousands of years ago. Human remains, in the form of preserved specimens, skeletal material or mummified remains provide evidence of their existence. Paintings, watercolours, prints and drawings show us what they might have looked like. Archival documents and books tell us something about the lives they led. Some of these records reveal individuals who, because of their appearance, were visibly different. This raises questions. How did they fit into the society in which they lived? Were their lives affected because of the way they looked? Did others treat them badly or did they profit from being different?

To help students to engage with the museum collections, to make sense of some of the material on display and to begin to discuss some of the more challenging issues and questions that this material raises the museum has developed a comprehensive resource pack for key stages 3 and 4. Designed primarily to support the citizenship curriculum, the pack is a mixture of resources for use in the classroom and activities that will help to provide structure and focus to a visit to the museum. There are also cross-curricular links to science, history, religious studies and PSHE.

• Download the free citizenship resource pack

For a discussion about how you can use the Hunterian Museum to support your citizenship teaching please call the head of learning and access on 020 7869 6561

Universities and HE Colleges

The museum encourages the practical use of its collections to enhance learning. It seeks to provide hands-on access to its collections wherever possible. The museum has a flexible approach and is happy to work with teachers and tutors to enable their students to get the most out of a visit to the museum.

The museum has created a dedicated learning space as part of the Hunterian Museum redevelopment.

The MacRae Gallery: Room to Discover is a flexible space that will provide easy access to the collections for individual research, group study and practical tutorials. The space can also be used for seminars and small workshops.

There is a range of equipment available to support the hands-on use of the collections and taught sessions. This includes stereo and light microscopes, micrometers, callipers and magnifiers, anatomical models and a data projector and screen.

Access to Surgicat, the Hunterian Museum collections database is provided through a dedicated workstation in the MacRae Gallery.  The database contains records of all the specimens and objects in the museum collections and also has records of some of the College and museum archives.

Surgicat enables students and tutors to research and plan their visit to the museum in advance. The database uses internationally recognised thesauri and is easy to search using MeSH terminology and taxonomic names.

From 2009 to 2011, the Hunterian Museum will be involved in an innovative AHRC-funded doctoral training programme, teaching PhD students the 'Theories and Methods: Literature, Science, and Medicine'. In collaboration with eleven other partners (the Universities of Salford, Keele, Leicester, Manchester, King's College London, the London Consortium, the Science Museum, National Maritime Museum, Museum of Science and Industry, Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the Wellcome Library) students will be taught by experts with different approaches to disciplinary boundaries, and will be equipped with the skills needed to utilise manuscript sources, rare books, material objects, philosophy, literature, film and visual arts in their study. Over the next two years each partner will host one event and contribute teaching to the whole programme. There will be twenty funded places per event for PhD students to attend events. The project website http://litscimed.org.uk/ has further details of events, resources and the application process.

The MacRae Gallery: Room to Discover

The fees for this room are:

• £150 plus VAT for a half day 10am-1pm or 1pm-5pm
• £280 plus VAT for a full day 10am-5pm

This includes use of specimens and access to all the supporting equipment.
Bench space can also be reserved for up to four people.

Please contact the museum on 020 7869 6560 or email museums@rcseng.ac.uk, to book your visit and to explore the possible uses of the collections.

Learning for life

The museum recognises the importance of learning for life. It has developed a range of events and activities to support its permanent and temporary exhibitions. These include a stimulating programme of daytime and evening talks, museum tours as well as sculpture and drawing workshops.

The museum is happy to work with adult learners, WEA and U3A tutors, local historical societies and community groups to put together a visit that best caters to their learning needs and interests.

Please contact the museum on 020 7869 6560 or email museums@rcseng.ac.uk to plan your visit and to explore what the museum can offer your group.

Families and children

Children and families are welcome at the Hunterian Museum.

Hands-on material for children and families

Available every day the museum is open:

• The skeleton and organs body coats. Try on the skeleton coat and find out about the different size and shape of the bones in your body. Put on the organ tabard and then see if you can work out how your heart, lungs, stomach, kidneys and other major organs fit together inside of you. Where does it all go?
• Models of the human skeleton with movable parts to help you learn more about how we bend and flex our joints, and what we look like on the inside.
• A range of books for children of all ages that look at the human body, human evolution, animals and birds, history and science.
• Plenty of arts and craft materials so that you can make your own drawings or artwork of your favourite specimen in the museum to take home.
• A series of trails and short quizzes to help children of different ages explore the museum and discover more about the people and the animals that are on display.  Please ask at the museum reception desk.

The museum contains preserved human and animal remains showing normal anatomy as well as diseases; this includes specimens preserved in fluid as well as skeletons, bones and teeth. Parents and carers should take this into consideration before they visit the museum.

School holiday activities

During the Feburary and October half-term breaks the Museum runs special events aimed at families. These can include:

Jones the Bones

Meet the eccentric surgeon Jones the Bones and his skeleton as they take you on a wondrous journey around the human body. Jones the Bones will be able to answer all your questions about the human body, from what happens when you swallow your food, to why we fart! He'll also supply you with a healthy dose of horrible facts to impress your friends.

The Barber Surgeon: leeches, lancets and blood-letting

Come and meet Rory McCreadie, a Barber Surgeon who would have worked in the 16th and 17th centuries. Rory will explain how trephining (drilling a hole in the skull) was used to release evil spirits and help to cure a nasty headache.  He will show you the instruments used for the most dangerous operation performed at that time and demonstrate bloodletting, giving you a chance to meet some blood-sucking leeches!