Education
For All the People presents the following classroom resources for K-12 and undergraduate educators and their students. These resources are designed to be starting points for exploring historical perspectives and existing tools and services for considering people’s access to health care in the United States. Educators are welcome to adapt them in whole or in part as appropriate for their students’ interests and learning goals.
Lesson Plans
The Power of Medicine
- grade level: 7–10 | subject: history and social studies
This lesson plan uses “The Power of Medicine” from the For All the People online exhibition. Students review and identify key elements of the web page in evaluating different types of information available on an online source. They explore the images and information presented in “The Power of Medicine,” learning about different ways in which people worked to extend medical care to others in the past. Finally students are tasked to research and present the work of American nurse and physician, Lillian Wald and Leonidas Berry, MD, respectively.
Higher Education
Health Care Reform and History
The module examines a century of efforts to reform the U.S. health care system, from 1915 to the present. The six classes guide students through Progressive-era insurance campaigns, health politics in the Great Depression and World War Two, the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, the defeat of the Clinton health plan, and battles over the Affordable Care Act today. Selections of primary and secondary readings, cartoons, and videos allow students to analyze how changes in the economy, medical care, presidential politics, social movements, and the media help explain the differing results of health reform campaigns.
Health Care Reform and History is authored by Beatrix Hoffman, PhD, Professor of History at Northern Illinois University.
Online Activities
Communities & Health Care
Explore how ordinary people took extraordinary actions to create access to health care for their communities.
Other Resources
Continue to explore the history of and on-going debates over health care system and its reform in the United States, starting with the Curator’s Bibliography or Online Resources.
Continue to Other Resources