In 1960 the British tabloid The Sunday People featured a story that put both mental health and Oxford in the spotlight. The article told the story of Betty May Huffer, a 39-year-old woman who had ‘escaped’ from the Littlemore Psychiatric Hospital on the edges of Oxford. Born in North London, Betty had been an inmate at the Littlemore since 1938, arriving as a teenager. In an interview with the newspaper Betty revealed that her decision to run away was triggered by her being moved to a job in the hospital that she didn’t like. Having worked variously as a cleaner, laundress and even as a maid to one of the doctors, Betty was re-assigned to dishwashing in the canteen. Alongside another patient, Betty escaped. It's not clear why the case of Betty May Huffer specifically attracted political and media attention. But her story emerged at a critical moment in British psychiatry. The 1959 Mental Health Act set in motion the process of deinstitutionalisation and carved a slow path toward community-based models of mental health care.
Betty’s story is just one that features in a new series of workbooks for secondary school-age students produced by Oxford Health Histories (OHH) to accompany our website (https://oxfordhealth.web.ox.ac.uk/). The purpose of OHH is to explore histories of health and medicine in Oxfordshire, offering new perspectives and a range of methodologies. The workbooks are developed from three of our key themes on the website: anatomy, penicillin and mental health.
In each one we connect local histories with global histories, encouraging students to explore history on their doorstep as well as the wider historical picture. Colourful and engaging with design by local artist Kati Lacey, the workbooks provide lesson plans and activities for students to get stuck into. The workbooks encourage thinking about the different ways we can view the history of medicine, all while thinking about stories from our own city. The penicillin workbook, for example, invites students to reflect on why not everyone in the Oxford medical team responsible for its innovation is listed on the blue plaques celebrating its discovery, opening discussion on the role of women and lab workers in science and research. The anatomy workbook, in turn, sensitively approaches questions around dissection, ethics, and class, introducing cultural differences in how people have historically responded to the use of bodies in scientific research.
The workbooks were designed in partnership with Uncomfortable Oxford, and primarily authored by Zaiba Patel, an Oxford DPhil student in school history education. Before publication, they were also reviewed by local secondary school teachers. The ’Anatomy’ and ‘Penicillin’ workbooks are best suited to GCSE students, especially those working on modules about the history of medicine through time. The ‘Mental Health' workbook is designed to be more flexible for use from Year 9 upwards in PHSE, local history, history of medicine, or even as the basis for an EPQ. We are extremely grateful to the John Fell Fund for funding this project via the Faculty of History Community History Hub, and to the support of the community history and medical humanities teams at the University.
You can find the workbooks here:
https://oxfordhealth.web.ox.ac.uk/workbooks-schools-and-students
For more information contact: sally.frampton@history.ox.ac.uk
