Were medieval hospitals places where people were actually healed, or were they mainly institutions of care, charity, and religion?

This fully resourced, interactive GCSE lesson explores the role of hospitals in medieval England, helping students investigate how the Church shaped healthcare during the Middle Ages. Through enquiry-based activities, students examine whether hospitals were primarily places of medical treatment or centres providing care, shelter, and spiritual support.

The lesson encourages students to think critically about medieval attitudes to illness, religion, and treatment while building key historical reasoning and source analysis skills.

The lesson includes:

A visual interpretation starter where students gradually reveal a medieval hospital scene and make observations about conditions and care.

A low-stakes register task introducing the idea that wealthy donors funded hospitals in return for spiritual rewards.

A structured WWYD (What Would You Do?) decision activity where students step into the role of the medieval Church, deciding how hospitals should be funded, organised, and run.

A reflective evaluation task where students judge the Church’s decisions using interpretive language (e.g. clever, manipulative, sensible).

A short source inference task using an extract from the Paston Letters (1464) to explore attitudes towards physicians.

A final plenary classification challenge where students decide which objects would realistically be found in a medieval hospital.

All worksheets, slides, and full slide-by-slide teacher notes are included.

Designed for Edexcel GCSE Medicine Through Time, but easily adaptable for AQA, OCR, or Eduqas courses.

The lesson develops key historical skills including inference, interpretation, evaluation, and judgement, while helping students understand how religion, charity, and limited medical knowledge shaped medieval healthcare.