Source 1. PRO Ref. EDSO/8
Source 2. Salvation Army International Heritage Centre

This snapshot could fit into a number of curriculum contexts.

• As part of the story of improving public health. The 19^th century had seen legislation to ensure the basics -clean water, sewage disposal, decent housing. But still, as the "Background" makes clear, this did not seem enough to ensure a more healthy population. School meals are one of the markers of the state becoming more and more drawn into people's lives in the 20^th century. Compulsory notification of births came in 1907. After the First World War came council houses and after the Second, the National Health Service, offering security "from the cradle to the grave" - something the Victorians would never have dreamed of.
• As part of the story of increasing government intervention in people's lives. By the latter part of the 20^th century, the well-being of individuals had become the concern of the state with regard to their birth, education, child and adult health, housing, old age and death.
• As an introduction to the questioning of this provision which Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher initiated, with her call to lift the "nanny state" off people's lives.
• As an example of the way local government used to regard the people they served: caring for them, ready to intervene in their lives in a big, but rather paternalistic way, and not uncritical.
  
  

Twentieth Century Medicine: How has it changed the lives of people? KS3