In the five centuries since Europeans were introduced to tobacco, smoking has generated considerable controversy. This gallery tracks shifting views on smoking and health, from life-saving stimulant ...

At the age of 22 I found myself in an airless, dreary and packed family court in India. My violent and abusive marriage was coming to an end. My husband couldn’t stand the fact that I was an ...

show credit information for image 'Legacies of eugenics in school' Legacies of eugenics in school. © Gergo Varga (varrgo.com) for Wellcome Collection. When A-level ...

show credit information for image 'A covered corpse lying on a bed. Etching by Ch. Chaplin after Louis-Henri Deschamps.' When terrible winter storms lashed the East Coast of America in December 2022, ...

Michael W Young feels the effects on his body whenever he spends time in Manhattan. Though his research team is based in New York, at Rockefeller University, Young lives outside the city and is ...

We think of assistive technology as something modern, and that people with mobility issues in the past were limited to their locality or confined within their homes. But there are clues in the ...

My whole life had been marked by pain that I never had a name for. My family and I always thought that I just had a bit of a ‘weird body’. I experienced dislocations, subluxations, slipped disks, and ...

How do you avoid catching the plague? Smoke constantly. Carry a sponge soaked in vinegar. Hang oranges studded with cloves around your house. This was the best medical advice available circa 1665, as ...

Bobby Baker began her diary drawings in 1997 when she became a patient at a day centre. Originally private, they gradually became a way for her to communicate complex thoughts and emotions that were ...

show credit information for image 'Geothermal hot spring landscape in Railroad Valley, Nevada, where a Canadian mining company is drilling a new hole in an effort to find large deposits of lithium.

show credit information for image 'The diagnosis: a skeletal doctor measures a patient's pulse' I’m a historian of medieval and early modern medicine, and when I tell people what I do for a living, ...

show credit information for image 'Phallic object, large plaster female figure.' Alfred Charles Kinsey once said that a nymphomaniac is “someone who has more sex than you do”, and Kinsey was a man who ...