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79 results
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  • Article

Why the 1918 Spanish flu defied both memory and imagination

| Mark Honigsbaum

The Black Death, AIDS and Ebola outbreaks are part of our collective cultural memory, but the Spanish flu outbreak has not been.

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The metamorphosis of masturbation

| Dr Kate Lister

Throughout history, medics and campaigners have tried to stamp out masturbation – but is modern science transforming its reputation?

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The child whose town rejected vaccines

| Anna Faherty

Gloucester, 1896. Ethel Cromwell is taken ill at the height of Britain’s last great smallpox epidemic.

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The stranger who started an epidemic

| Anna Faherty

New Orleans, 1853. James McGuigan arrives in the port city and succumbs to yellow fever.

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Drug sharing in desperate times

| NicoleThomas S G Farnetti

When Nicole was threatened with deportation, her mental health deteriorated. Now without a job, a passport or a doctor, she depends on others to send her their leftover anxiety drugs.

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When wounds replace words

| Jules MontagueSteven Pocock

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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Public health campaigns and the ‘threat’ of disability

| Aparna Nair

By continuing to represent disability as the feared outcome of disease, public health campaigns help to perpetuate prejudice against disabled people.

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The pain that punished feminists

| Jaipreet VirdiAnne Howeson

In a society that viewed getting the vote, and pursuing an education and career, as unnatural goals for women, the pain of endometriosis was viewed as nature’s retribution.

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Thalidomide babies

| Ruth BlueHollie Chastain

In a time without scans or antenatal tests, neither medical staff nor parents were prepared for the damage to the foetus caused by the thalidomide drug.

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Bloody capitalism and the cash flow of the menstrual cycle

| Dr Camilla RøstvikJo Hanley

Once they thrived on taboos and shame. Now period-product manufacturers are finding new ways to flourish in this era of period activism – but products aren’t the end of the story.

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Leaving Mexico and finding refuge in hope

| Laura Morales

In Mexico, violence of all kinds – organised, street, domestic – is accepted as normal. From the UK, Laura Morales speaks out and fights to help those suffering back home.

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The search for a cure for endometriosis

| Jaipreet VirdiAnne Howeson

Discover how a white American doctor’s experimental operations on black female slaves laid the foundations for modern gynaecological surgery.

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Born in the NHS

| Cal Flyn

Despite underfunding, strikes and scandals, the first two decades of the 2000s has seen the British people’s love of and loyalty to the NHS soar.

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Would you like to buy a unicorn?

| Cassidy Phillips

The story behind why somebody tried to sell Henry Wellcome a unicorn head in 1928.

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Guerrilla public health

| Harry Shapiro

From safe-use guides to needle exchange schemes, Harry Shapiro reflects on 40 years of drug harm reduction in the UK.

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A bad atmosphere in the Balkans

| Natasha TripneyDragan Mujan

The citizens of Belgrade, one of the most polluted cities in Europe, are finally pushing back against the polluters, whose activities they’ve been encouraged to accept.

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Happiness in time

| Kate WilkinsonLaurindo Feliciano

Trying to define happiness is like trying to grasp water: it evades us, constantly changing and becoming evident only in retrospect.

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Acid and the sexual psychonauts

| Alex DymockBen MechenLeah Moyle

How LSD fuelled one woman’s journey of sexual self-discovery in the late 1950s.

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The unearthly children of science fiction’s Cold War

| Ken Hollings

In the 1950s a new figure emerged in British novels, film and television: a disturbing young alien that revealed postwar society’s fear of the unruly power of teenagers.

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Tripping for spiritualism and science

| Stevyn Colgan

Getting high in the name of religion or creativity has been practised for centuries. Now it seems hallucinogenics could help treat mental illnesses too.

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The law of periodicity for menstruation

| Lalita Kaplish

Dr Edward Clarke's Law of Periodicity claimed that females who were educated alongside their male peers were developing their minds at the expense of their reproductive organs.

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The family food of a kebab van man

| Melek ErdalAnna Keville Joyce

Melek Erdal celebrates the physical and mental resilience of her father Yusuf, forged by isolation and dislocation, and reinforced by the distinctive cuisine of his home country, Turkey.

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Why are women more willing donors than men?

| Hannah PartosThomas S G Farnetti

Why is there a gender imbalance when it comes to the donation of organs, blood and tissue, and what can be done about it?

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Yoga gets physical

| Lalita Kaplish

Modern yoga owes a debt to the physical culture movement that created a world obsessed with health and fitness.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

Tracing the roots of our fears and fixations

| Kate SummerscaleTim Robinson

Kate Summerscale explores the history of our anxieties and compulsions, and the new phobias and manias that are always emerging.