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15 results
  • Article
  • Article

Two health centres, two ideologies

| Emily Sargent

Two futuristic, light-filled buildings aimed to bring forward-looking healthcare to city dwellers. But the principles behind each were very different.

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  • Article

Desperate housewives and suburban neurosis

| Giulia Smith

Discover how a pioneering health centre replaced housewives’ supposedly empty home lives with a social space that encouraged healthy child rearing.

  • Article
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Reversing the psychiatric gaze

| Leah Sidi

Nineteenth-century psychiatrists were keen to categorise their patients’ illnesses reductively – by their physical appearance. But we can see a far more complex picture of mental distress, revealed by those patients able to express their inner worlds in art.

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  • Article

Booze and bad behaviour

| Stevyn Colgan

Our love of alcohol is like a party that’s lasted nine centuries. But there are signs that the demon drink is losing its appeal.

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Doctors and the English seaside

| Jane Darcy

Fashionable seaside towns in England owe much of their popularity to 18th-century doctors, who advised them to take the 'sea cure'.

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Homes for the hives of industry

| Emily Sargent

By building workers’ villages, industry titans demonstrated both philanthropy and control. Employees’ health improved, while rulebooks told them how to live ideal lives.

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Adapting to life as a thalidomide survivor

| Ruth BlueHollie Chastain

Growing up as a thalidomide survivor meant coping with all the usual challenges of childhood and adolescence, while having to fit into a world designed for the able-bodied.

  • Article
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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
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Father of the house

| Stuart EversThomas S G Farnetti

Stuart Evers thought he’d shaken off his family’s rigid definition of masculinity. But when he became a dad, those buried patriarchal ideas made an unexpected return.

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Nurturing my autistic, gender-questioning child

| Jude LaxJack Lax

As mother of an autistic child who questions her gender, Jude Lax describes cherishing her growing daughter as she explores her identity.

  • Photo story
  • Photo story

Portraits, from a distance

| Michelle Sank

Join photographer Michelle Sank on her daily walk around Exeter. Strength, frustration, resilience and eccentricity all show in these candid images portraying life under the constraints of coronavirus lockdown.

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“Everybody desires a degree of independence”

| Jamie HaleBenjamin Gilbert

I’m 26, and building a network of friends and my career. Unlike most people my age, I’m entirely dependent on carers to achieve this.

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Who was Audrey Amiss?

| Elena Carter

Elena Carter introduces the vast collection left behind by artist Audrey Amiss, who documented her life in astonishing detail.

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  • Article

The enduring myth of the mad genius

| Anna Faherty

There’s a fine line to tread between creativity and psychosis.

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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.