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135 results
  • Interview
  • Interview

How to design an HIV awareness campaign

| Paul Steinberg

Using carefully crafted, colourful graphics is one public health team’s creative approach.

  • Podcast
  • Podcast

Resolve

Bidisha chats to her guests about their personal experiences of resolve, and considers its complicated relationship to happiness.

  • Article
  • Article

Cataloguing Audrey

| Elena Carter

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.

  • Article
  • Article

Sharing Nature: Plastic fantastic

| Lalita Kaplish

There are serious concerns about plastics in the environment. Yet they make our lives much easier, even in the natural world.

  • Article
  • Article

Getting under the skin

| Taryn Cain

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.

  • Comic
  • Comic

Swear

| Rob Bidder

While we may censor and bleep them, we all have our sweary moments. Words for times when polite language doesn’t quite cut it. Can you remember the last thing that made you swear?

  • Article
  • Article

The unexpected parallels between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Wellcome Collection

| Russell Dornan

With the news of a sequel in development, Russell Dornan explores parallels between ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and Wellcome Collection.

  • Article
  • Article

The chymist’s trade card

| Julia Nurse

An 18th-century trade card reveals far more than its owner may have intended.

  • Article
  • Article

Born different

| Chris North

For Chris North, being born intersex in the 1940s meant his many childhood hospital visits, tests and operations were not explained or discussed. As he reveals, doctors encouraged strict secrecy.

  • Article
  • Article

Surviving a flesh-eating disease

| Scott NeillNan Carreira

Nearly dying from a skin infection gave Scott Neill a chance to start again after an early life marked by grief and depression.

  • Article
  • Article

“Disability is never an individual diagnosis”

| David ProudThomas S G Farnetti

As a 35-year-old man, I am sure that my fear of getting old is not uncommon. But for me, that fear goes deeper. I have spina bifida.

  • Article
  • Article

Nymphomania and hypersexuality in women and men

| Taryn Cain

The history of nymphomania is closely bound with society's views on women and their sexuality.

  • Long read
  • Long read

Rehab centres and the ‘cure’ for addiction

| Guy StaggJess Nash

Guy Stagg takes us on a brief history of rehab centres and their approaches to addiction and recovery.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

Your gut’s instincts

| Elsa RichardsonSteven Pocock

Cultural historian Elsa Richardson explores the stomach’s influence over our emotions, and why trusting your gut is often good advice.

  • Article
  • Article

Invisibility

| Helen FosterEast Midlands Oral History ArchiveAsma Istwani

Why do menopausal women feel invisible? Because nobody talks about menopause or because society doesn't value older women?

  • Article
  • Article

What writing myself has revealed

| Caroline ButterwickKimberley Burrows

Caroline Butterwick talks to two creators about how lived experience feeds their art, and reflects on her own year of writing about her life.

  • Article
  • Article

Why do victims become violent?

| Laura BuiJessa Fairbrother

Witnessing both overt violence and coercive control can cause invisible harm to children. But preventing them from repeating that behaviour in the future remains a challenge.

  • Article
  • Article

What is air, and how do we know?

| Hasok ChangTracy Satchwill

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.

  • Article
  • Article

Seeds for the future

| Nataly Allasi CanalesCat O’Neil

Indigenous groups have a key role as guardians of biodiversity, and their knowledge could help us all preserve our world. To survive, we all need to collaborate, reject prejudice, and share what we know.

  • Article
  • Article

Six personal health zines that might change your life

| Loesja VigourNicola Cook

Personal zines put health conditions back in the hands of the people who experience them. Here are six that Wellcome Collection staff love.

  • Article
  • Article

Finding out where my lithium comes from

| Laura Grace SimpkinsMatjaž Krivic

The origins of the lithium Laura Grace Simpkins swallows daily are unclear. If we don’t know the provenance of our pills, how can we make informed decisions about them?

  • Article
  • Article

The first seizure

| Aparna NairTracy Satchwill

Historian Aparna Nair had her first seizure when she was 11. Here she recalls that first time, and how other people’s reactions are sometimes the most disturbing part about having a seizure.

  • Article
  • Article

A brief history of tattoos

| Amy Olson

The earliest evidence of tattoo art dates from 5000 BC, and the practice continues to hold meaning for many cultures around the world.

  • Article
  • Article

Why we no longer keep our dead at home

| Claire Cock-Starkey

Today in the UK we rarely sit with, touch, or perhaps even see our loved ones after they’ve died. Past practices were very different and, Claire Cock-Starkey argues, were more helpful for those grieving.

  • Article
  • Article

In the tracks of Derek Jarman’s tears

| E K MyersonBenjamin GilbertGeraint Lewis

Researcher E K Myerson shares her moving encounters with the personal papers of artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman.