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Trust me, I’m a patient
Artist Rachel Rowan Olive is an expert in the way her mental health condition affects her. Here she explains how it helps if doctors understand that.
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Hands-on healthcare
A young hospital volunteer feared her contribution was a long way from the serious business of real healthcare. But time spent painting patients’ nails proved to be a valuable contribution to life on the ward.
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Thalidomide survivors in the 21st century
As thalidomide survivors enter their 60s, they look back on their lives and the legacy of the thalidomide catastrophe.
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When ‘get well soon’ doesn’t cut it
When loved ones are seriously ill, we can hide behind dishonest platitudes or struggle to find the words. Meet the woman working to fix how we speak to sick people.
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Why we no longer keep our dead at home
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.
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My illness made me an activist, but now I’m exhausted
Emily Bashforth’s illness made her an advocate but now she’s battling burnout. She argues why we all need to be mental health activists, not just those with lived experience.
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The side effects of lithium mining
Laura Grace Simpkins attempts to untangle some uncomfortable truths about the social and environmental costs of making her medication.
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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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Vaccinating a community, saving lives
Doctor Jane Harvey always goes the extra mile to care for her patients, and in recent months that’s extended to huge efforts to save lives with her coronavirus vaccination push.
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How homesickness inspires art
Gail Tolley looks at homesickness through the eyes of three contemporary artists and finds powerful new themes of identity and connection.
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Words of hope and anger
Author and spoken word poet Penny Pepper remembers her childhood dreams, and speaks out against the barriers society uses to prevent disabled people from fulfilling their potential.
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Remote diagnosis from wee to the Web
Medical practice might have moved on from when patients posted flasks of their urine for doctors to taste, but telehealth today keeps up the tradition of remote diagnosis – to our possible detriment.
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Fashion for an unruly body
One weekend, just before an operation to correct her scoliosis, Rosalind Jana stopped trying to hide her body. Read how those two days helped her step into the future.
- Book extract
- Book extract
Of incubators, orchids and artificial wombs
In this extract from Claire Horn’s new book, ‘Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth’, she traces the development of the artificial womb, soon to become a reality.
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Heating up and drying out
Menopause doesn’t have to signify old age, but when your body feels like it’s letting you down, it’s hard not to believe that your useful life may be over.
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Don’t call me a strong Black woman
Her upbringing taught Jaydee Seaforth that she could never show pain or weakness, even when her internal distress was extreme. Find out how she learned to listen to her body.
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Thalidomide, a bitter pill
Hear from some of the women who took the drug thalidomide over sixty years ago about the fear, isolation and grief that they experienced as the appalling pharmaceutical scandal unfolded around them.
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The conditional child
Deanna Fei asks what it means to sustain a life, drawing on her own experience of having a premature baby as well as an 18th-century essay.
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Abandoning daydreams of a life without diabetes
After years of longing for a cure for her type 1 diabetes, Daisy Watson Shaw, partly due to medical advances in managing the condition, has reached a state of acceptance. Her wishes now are for greater understanding.
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Doctor in the house
A house is not always a home – sometimes it’s impermanent, impersonal. But other aspects of the itinerant life can be the source of a sense of home.
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Milk trails round Euston
Where cows once grazed near Wellcome Collection in London, baristas now froth their milk. Esther Leslie uncovers Euston’s dairy-based urban history.
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We need less ‘sickle cell warriors’ and more allies
Rejecting the epithet “warrior”, Cheryl Telfer describes the pervasive effect sickle cell disease has on her life, and calls for more people to donate blood to help sicklers.
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Transforming the decorative into dissent
Discover how embroidered messages by two ‘troublesome’ women in 19th-century asylums are mirrored in the therapeutic quilting work of writer Rachel May.
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Care, creativity and a connected world
Find out about the challenges Wellcome Collection has faced during the last very demanding year.
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The father of handwashing
Doctors performing autopsies and then delivering babies – with not a hint of soap in between – was the grim recipe producing a lot of motherless offspring in the 1800s. But one man’s gargantuan efforts to upend accepted medical thinking turned the tide.