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What is structural violence?

Structural violence is seemingly invisible. But its tentacles have invaded every part of many people’s lives, thoughts, experiences and expectations, shaping them in ways they don’t even realise.

Finding a cure for homesickness

While technology can mitigate some aspects of homesickness, other components of home are harder to replicate. Find out how 21st-century studies are helping homesickness sufferers find silver linings in their new situation.

Womb milk and the puzzle of the placenta

A human baby needs milk to survive – and this holds true even before it’s born. Joanna Wolfarth explores “womb milk”, as well as ancient and modern ideas about the placenta.

How to design an HIV awareness campaign

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

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.

The meanings of hurt

In the early modern period, gruesome incidents of self-castration and other types of self-injury garnished the literature of the time. Alanna Skuse explores the messages these wounds conveyed.

My important, ridiculous nose

The nose is a much-maligned appendage, but it’s a powerful organ capable of invoking powerful emotions from past memories and sexual attraction.

How electromagnetic therapy inspired me

Poet Sarah James explores how repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation treated her depression and influenced her art.

Interpreting the Ayurvedic Man

A British Sign Language video is the latest interpretation of an unique 18th-century Nepali painting about Ayurvedic medicine.

The ambivalence of air

Daisy Lafarge investigates the effects of air quality and pressure on body and mind, exploring air as cure, but one with contradictions.

Breaking the rules of online dating

Artists are taking on the trolls of Tinder and the gremlins of Grindr to question the limits of online dating.

The chymist’s trade card

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

How I escaped my anxiety and depression through architecture and poetry

Social anxiety led him to introversion and silence. The brutalist architecture of London’s Barbican Estate inspired his liberation in poetry.

The Key to Memory: Use art to articulate

Danny Rees explains what William Utermohlen’s self-portraits can tell us about how and why we remember.

Walk, interrupted

By listing all the things that get in her way, Caroline Butterwick wants to create an embodied experience of disability and convince you that inclusion is everyone’s responsibility.

Documents of my breath

Swati Joshi’s childhood bronchitis meant that she couldn’t imagine being able to breathe easily. As an adult, she chronicles her recovery through artworks created using bubbles and her breath.

From chef’s whites to medical scrubs

Meet the machinists who have rapidly switched from making clothing for hospitality staff to uniforms for hospital workers.

How architecture builds a profession of stress

Architects might produce buildings that enhance our health, but at what cost? Kristin Hohenadel explores architecture’s pressurised and stressful culture.

How the Peckham Experiment inspired my fiction

Find out how an unruly mass of archive material from a 1930s radical health centre has inspired brand new writing.

Questioning the psychoanalyst

Maggie Robbins gives her personal take on the common misconceptions around her field of work.

Titans in the landscape

Taking the piss

Council cuts have created public-toilet deserts across the UK, limiting journeys and days out for people whose medical conditions mean toilet access is essential. Campaigner Kevin Crowe highlights the issues.

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.

Losing touch

In these pandemic times, when touch has become taboo, Agnese Reginaldo explores the importance of physical contact to our wellbeing.

When depression is worse than physical illness

Chronic physical illnesses can be accompanied by troubling depressive symptoms. Elly Aylwin-Foster urges doctors to treat every aspect of her condition with the same care.