- Article
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Desperate housewives and suburban neurosis
Discover how a pioneering health centre replaced housewives’ supposedly empty home lives with a social space that encouraged healthy child rearing.
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- Article
Race, religion and the Black Madonna
Mystery and controversy surround the dark-skinned religious icon who represents the Virgin Mary throughout the Catholic world.
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Getting under the skin
Before the invention of X-ray in 1895 there was really only one way to accurately study the human body, and that was to cut it open.
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What the nose doesn’t know
Losing her sense of smell for over a year motivated Stephanie Howard-Smith to sniff out the history of treatments for this unsettling condition.
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Reversing the psychiatric gaze
Nineteenth-century psychiatrists were keen to categorise their patients’ illnesses reductively – by their physical appearance. But we can see a far more complex picture of mental distress, revealed by those patients able to express their inner worlds in art.
- Interview
- Interview
Inside the mind of George Vasey, co-curator of Misbehaving Bodies
Discover how curator George Vasey honoured the approaches of Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery, who mischievously subvert clichés around illness and death.
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Good animals, bad humans?
Could an animal be more evolved than a human? Victorian psychologists thought that in some cases the answer could be ‘yes’.
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Would you like to buy a dinosaur?
Two remarkable letters and a drawing of a plesiosaur by Mary Anning offer a tantalising portal into the exciting world of fossil hunting and discovery of the 1800s.
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Bubbles of history
Since the 1960s, scientists have been able to study the air from past centuries by analysing particles in Arctic ice samples. But as the polar ice melts, the future of this research is changing.
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The building as tool of healing
When we’re ill, it’s not just medical care that helps to treat us. Architects have discovered that the right environment can play an important part too.
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The tower in fiction, film and life
The high-rise estates born of postwar idealism soon became symbols of crime and squalor. But after one terrible tragedy, public bodies are being forced to rethink our towers.
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Uncovering experiences of dementia
Focusing on three 19th-century women’s case notes, Millie van der Byl Williams explores how our definition of dementia has changed.
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The indelible harm caused by conversion therapy
With first-hand evidence from two powerful testimonies, neurologist Jules Montague explores the destructive history of conversion therapy, a punitive treatment designed to ‘cure’ people of homosexuality.
- Interview
- Interview
Inside the mind of Ayurvedic Man’s curator, Bárbara Rodriguez Muñoz
The choices a curator makes – what goes in? what stays out? why? – are often as fascinating as the exhibition itself.
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The making of ‘Quacks’
How do you create a medical comedy that’s authentic and laugh-out-loud funny?
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Confusion, guilt, and the battle to breastfeed
Most new mums are told that breast is best. But breastfeeding doesn’t always come as easily or naturally as you might imagine.
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Self-obsessing in the age of selfies
The tiny, joyful spark of a social media ‘like’ can lead to a damaging obsession. Find out how far people will go when their phone addiction gets the upper hand.
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Guerrilla public health
From safe-use guides to needle exchange schemes, Harry Shapiro reflects on 40 years of drug harm reduction in the UK.