Stories

Our words and pictures explore the connections between science, medicine, life and art. Dive into one no matter where in the world you are.

1-20
  • Comic

FINE!

There’s life on both sides of the desk.

Part of Sorry to keep you waiting

  • Serial
Part2

Are people born violent?

Laura Bui explores how the nature vs nurture debate applies to those who commit homicide.

Part of The Hidden Side of Violence

  • Book extract

Naked, not nude

Classicist Caroline Vout argues that it’s time to take the dust covers off the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and to encounter their bodies not nude, but naked.

Part of Inside Our Books

  • Comic

Changing advice

“The foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wise man knowes himselfe to be a foole.”

Part of Sorry to keep you waiting

  • Serial
Part1

What is violence?

Criminologist Laura Bui explores her early understanding of violence and outlines its definition and wider consequences.

Part of The Hidden Side of Violence

  • Article

What is air, and how do we know?

Watching bubbles in fermenting beer led 18th-century scientist Joseph Priestley to invent sparkling water – and to discover that different gases make up the air we breathe.

  • In pictures

Laughing gas and the scientific pursuit of the sublime

Part science lecture. part public spectacle, thanks to chemist Humphry Davy the 19th-century craze for inhaling nitrous oxide rapidly spread from the science laboratory to fashionable salons and homes of the day, and onto the popular stage.

Part of Inside Our Collections

  • In pictures

Anxiety in the air

Our centuries-old fear of disease-carrying “bad air” might have been modified by scientific advances, but it’s still liable to re-emerge under the right circumstances, as Kirsten Nicholson explains.

Part of Inside Our Collections

  • Article

Eugenics and the welfare state

Indy Bhullar explores the ideas of William Beveridge and Richard Titmuss, who were strongly influenced by eugenic thinking, and yet championed the idea of the welfare state.

Part of Eugenics and other stories

  • Article

Making sunstroke insanity

Medical historian Dr Kristin Hussey takes a closer look at sunstroke and mental illness, and how, in the late 19th century, they connected at the crossroads of colonial science and the idea of whiteness.

Part of Eugenics and other stories

  • Article

The secret lives of Britain’s first Black physicians

Dr Annabel Sowemimo explores the web of connections between early Black British doctors, the role of empire in West Africa and the pernicious reach of scientific racism.

Part of Eugenics and other stories

  • Article

How tuberculosis became a test case for eugenic theory

A 19th-century collaboration that failed to prove how facial features could indicate the diseases people were most likely to suffer from became a significant stepping stone in the new ‘science’ of eugenics.

Part of Eugenics and other stories

  • Article

Intelligence testing, race and eugenics

Specious ideas and assumptions about intelligence that were born during the great flourishing of eugenics well over 100 years ago still inform the British education system today, as Nazlin Bhimani reveals.

Part of Eugenics and other stories

  • Comic

Presenteeism

Who is the more indispensable?

Part of Sorry to keep you waiting

  • Article

Maladaptive daydreaming, gender myths and me

Can you daydream too much? Excessive daydreamer Laura Grace Simpkins reflects on studies into “maladaptive daydreaming” and asks why so few fellow dreamers seem to be men.

  • In pictures

Guilty chimneys and the threat to the air we breathe

Industrialisation brought visibly polluted air to the world’s cities, captured in various media from the 1800s. Angela Saward explores the methods used, and the messages the images conveyed.

Part of Inside Our Collections

  • Comic

Scanxiety

You’ll never understand the impact of a cancer diagnosis. Until you get one.

Part of Sorry to keep you waiting

  • Article

How nature is defending itself in court

The idea that nature has legal rights is increasingly being taken seriously, but who gets to speak for it? Isabella Kaminski asks how the non-human can be represented within a human-made system.

  • Article

Writing back to authority

As she cuts up old doctors’ letters and uses them to compose absurd poems, Caroline Butterwick reflects on the catharsis of creation and proposes writing as a way to take back control.

Part of Writing Myself

  • Comic

Dr No

Saying ‘no’ is sometimes part of the job. Long hours are always part of the job.

Part of Sorry to keep you waiting