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Pain and the power of activism
Today, women with endometriosis have more access to better information than ever before. Jaipreet Virdi applauds the shared stories, online communities and self-help books empowering women in pain.
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Cataloguing Audrey
Work begins in earnest to restore order to the archive Audrey Amiss kept of the minutest happenings in her life. Like detectives, the archivists search for subtle clues to chronology in the mass of materials.
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The Key to Memory: Follow your nose
Elissavet Ntoulia explores what a pair of pomanders can tell us about how and why we remember.
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Digitising Audrey
Building digital images of what Audrey created means that her work can be frozen in time – for the digital version, at least, the process of decay is halted, and any number of people can view it without the risk of damaging it.
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Foraging for a taste of the past
Follow tips from a professional forager to recreate delicious 18th-century recipes from plants growing wild in parks and on urban wasteland.
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Revelations of blindness in the Middle Ages
Medieval texts, from Islamic medical treatises to Christian books of miracles, reveal surprisingly varied and complex experiences of blindness. But when medieval scholar Jude Seal experienced visual impairment themselves, they gained an even deeper understanding of the lives they were studying.
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Seeking the hoarder in literature
As she strives to deepen her understanding of hoarding, Georgie Evans turns to books. But depictions of hoards and hoarders are few and often sparse, except in one surprising place.
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Mapping the body
These intricate anatomical drawings show how Ayurveda practitioners have explored the human body and how it works.
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- Book extract
“I’ve never talked to anybody about this before”
Douglas is furious. He’s at crisis point and needs help. Read the first of his two sessions with psychoanalyst Susie Orbach.
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Sharing Nature: Over the rainbow
Here’s your choice of the most meaningful nature photo on the theme of health.
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Would you like to buy a unicorn?
The story behind why somebody tried to sell Henry Wellcome a unicorn head in 1928.
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A woman in her wilderness of things
Even though her home was overwhelmed with stuff, Georgie Evans’s grandma couldn’t stop buying things. In this series, Georgie delves into hoarding, and attempts to make sense of her grandma’s behaviour.
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Conserving Audrey
Elena describes how specially designed storage allows Audrey’s scrapbooks to retain all traces of her creative process, although their intrinsic fragility means deterioration is almost inevitable.
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Birth, babies and boxes of memories
With memories of her baby in neonatal intensive care still fresh, Erin Beeston decides to unearth the poignant objects her family kept following births, going back as far as Victorian times.
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Sex in graphic novels
Sex and sexuality have long been explored in the history of the graphic novel.
- Photo story
- Photo story
Beautiful bedding and how to die well
When you are unwell, your bed can be both a refuge and a prison. Discover how artist Poppy Nash created a bed-centred artwork inspired by her own chronic illness and depictions of ill health from history.
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Audrey in the world
As the collection is fully catalogued, the archive is opened up to the public. A feature film about Audrey premieres, and Audrey gets her own Wikipedia page, so people can learn about her. For archivist Elena, it’s time to step back.
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How do advertisers get inside our heads?
Vance Packard exposed techniques of mass manipulation developed by 1950s advertisers that are still at work today in the age of big data.
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In the tracks of Derek Jarman’s tears
Researcher E K Myerson shares her moving encounters with the personal papers of artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman.
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The power of unicorns
Discover the unlikely connection between pharmaceuticals and unicorns.
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The solidarity of sickness
Visiting an injured friend in hospital prompts writer Sinéad Gleeson to reflect on the instant rapport forged between compatriots in the kingdom of the sick.
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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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Nymphomania and hypersexuality in women and men
The history of nymphomania is closely bound with society's views on women and their sexuality.
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The yogi as hermit, warrior, criminal and showman
How the modern world changed the life and reputation of the yogi.
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Does mass media pave the way to fascism?
In the aftermath of World War II, psychoanalysts found the psychological roots of authoritarianism closer to home than was comfortable.