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Healing hard-working hands
The names we use to describe different hand injuries tell us about history, gender and class. Occupational therapist María Cristina Jiménez explores those injuries, and the changing ways we talk about them.
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The poor child’s nurse
Charming family scenes in Victorian ads for children’s medicines were at odds with some of the dangerous ingredients they contained.
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Witches
Many of the women persecuted as witches in the 16th-century “witch craze” were over 50 and exhibited signs of menopause. Helen Foster suggests that the stigma of the wicked witch still affects older women and how they deal with menopause.
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Why we need to decolonise the skies
Astronomer Dr Tana Joseph explores how rethinking way we look at the stars could improve our relationship with our own planet and make it a healthier place to live.
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What is violence?
Criminologist Laura Bui explores her early understanding of violence and outlines its definition and wider consequences.
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When monarchs healed the sick
Our current Queen fortunately doesn’t have to spend hours laying hands on the sick to cure them. But it was a different story for monarchs of the early modern era, whose touch was a sought-after treatment for scrofula.
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Cracks that let the light in
Rai Waddingham lives with voices other people cannot hear. Here she describes how she has come to accept, understand and calm her voices, and to acknowledge her strength.
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Medics, migration and the NHS
In the 1960s the NHS became Britain’s biggest employer. So to help fill all those jobs, the government brought in thousands of workers from abroad.
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When wounds replace words
For the many thousands of refugees waiting in Greece, the process to establish the truth of their tragic personal histories is often extremely upsetting. But a group of medics and legal workers is working together to make the system more humane.
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Notes upon arrival
In an effort to feel at home back in the country of her birth, poet Bhanu Kapil recognises the small revelations of nature in a chilly UK spring as a way to reconnect.
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Searching for a place to call home
Wherever she’s lived, Tanya Perdikou has rarely felt at home, and numerous moves have perpetuated a sense of disconnection. But signs from nature offer powerful moments of connection.
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Shame and the online free-for-all
Lucia Osborne-Crowley looks at how shame manifests online, where public humiliation is common and second chances all too rare.
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Are doctors medical detectives?
Do doctors really identify medical conditions in the same way that detectives solve crimes? Neurologist Jules Montague makes her diagnosis.
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Robinson Crusoe and the morality of solitude
Robinson Crusoe, fiction’s most famous castaway, was certainly isolated, but did he suffer the intrinsically modern affliction of loneliness?
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Drugs in Victorian Britain
Many common remedies were taken throughout the 19th century, with more people than ever using them. What was the social and cultural context of this development?
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How we bury our children
Following her baby daughter’s funeral, Wendy Pratt found that visiting the grave gave her a way to carry out physical acts of caring for her child. Here she considers how parents’ nurturing instincts live on after a child’s death.
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The house of Joan
The longueurs of hospital stays and enforced inactivity were the spur to Joan’s precise tailoring skills and flamboyant creations, all to the benefit of her fashion-loving sisters.
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- Book extract
The shape of thought
Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s description of the moment in 1887 when he saw a brain cell for the first time never fails to move neuroscientist Richard Wingate to tears. Here he captures that enduring sense of wonder.
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Manipulating the evidence with deepfake technology
How can you be sure that the person speaking on the screen is genuine? Find out how sophisticated digital manipulation is blurring the boundaries between real and ‘deepfake’.
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Synaesthesia, or when senses overlap
What’s it like to see heartbeats, taste Tube stations or hear paintings?
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The colonist who faced the blue terror
India, 1857. In a British enclave, Katherine Bartrum watches her friend, and then her family, succumb to the deadly cholera.
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- Book extract
What the wind can bring
In this extract from ‘This Book is a Plant’, Amanda Thomson shares a newfound fascination with flowers, and reveals why our relationship with plants can also be complicated.
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The cook who became a pariah
New York, 1907. Mary Mallon spreads infection, unaware that her name will one day become synonymous with typhoid.
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How electromagnetic therapy inspired me
Poet Sarah James explores how repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation treated her depression and influenced her art.
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- Book extract
The 200-year search for normal people
Sarah Chaney poses the question we’ve likely all asked at some point in our lives: 'Am I normal?’, and explores whether normality even exists.