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36 results
  • Article
  • Article

Deadly doses and the hardest of hard drugs

| Stevyn Colgan

The invention of the modern hypodermic syringe meant we could get high – or accidentally die – faster than before. Find out how this medical breakthrough was adapted for deadly uses.

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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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  • Article

History of condoms from animal to rubber

| Taryn Cain

Come on a journey from the first recorded condoms in the 16th century to the modern female condoms in the 1990s – and everything in between.

  • Article
  • Article

Witches

| Helen FosterEast Midlands Oral History ArchiveAsma Istwani

Many of the women persecuted as witches in the 16th-century “witch craze” were over 50 and exhibited signs of menopause. Helen Foster suggests that the stigma of the wicked witch still affects older women and how they deal with menopause.

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  • Article

Fantastic beasts and unnatural history

| Cassidy Phillips

Find out how a 17th-century compendium of the natural world came to present fantastical beasts –like dragons – as real, living creatures.

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The hidden history of homesickness

| Gail TolleyMaria Rivans

Gail Tolley delves into the history of homesickness and discovers that its rich past holds a clue to how we view the experience today.

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The yogi as hermit, warrior, criminal and showman

| Lalita Kaplish

How the modern world changed the life and reputation of the yogi.

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Not one yoga, but many yogas

| Lalita Kaplish

From ancient tradition to modern gym class, yoga means many things to many people.

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  • Article

The painter, the psychiatrist and a fashion for hysteria

| Natasha Ruiz-GómezKathleen Arundell

A dramatic painting brings a famous event in medical history alive. But it also tells a tale about the health preoccupations of the time.

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  • Article

The making of ‘Quacks’

| Helen Babbs

How do you create a medical comedy that’s authentic and laugh-out-loud funny?

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  • Article

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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  • Article

The Ladies of Llangollen

| Sarah Bentley

As we celebrate LGBT History Month, Sarah Bentley explores the relationship between the two 18th-century women known as the Ladies of Llangollen.

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  • Article

Duelling doctors

| Russell Moul

An enduring enthusiasm for 18th-century gentlemen to defend their ‘honour’ by duelling placed doctors in a delicate position. Specially when they faced being shot themselves.

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  • Article

Mapping the body

These intricate anatomical drawings show how Ayurveda practitioners have explored the human body and how it works.

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  • 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.

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  • Article

What is hysteria?

| Sarah Jaffray

Hysteria has long been associated with fanciful myths, but its history reveals how it has been used to control women’s behaviour and bodies

  • 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.

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How to be poor and happy

| Em LedgerCamilla Greenwell

Money, security, self-sufficiency and charitable giving have long been linked to happiness. But what if you’re working class?

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Remote diagnosis from wee to the Web

| Christine RoSteven Pocock

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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Thunderbolts and lightning

| Ruth Garde

Fire in the sky has always exerted a hold on our imagination, even as early scientists unlocked the secrets of atmospheric electricity.

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  • Article

Hunting lost plants in botanical collections

| Nataly Allasi CanalesCat O’Neil

A bark specimen at Kew recalls the story of a South American man who harvested the most potent source of the only effective malaria treatment available in the late 1800s. Killed for his work and forgotten by history, Manuel Mamani was a victim of the colonial juggernaut.

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  • Article

What the nose doesn’t know

| Stephanie Howard-SmithSteven Pocock

Losing her sense of smell for over a year motivated Stephanie Howard-Smith to sniff out the history of treatments for this unsettling condition.

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  • Article

Exceptional talent and the trouble with IQ tests

| Anna Faherty

Is a high IQ really a mark of genius, or does something else explain the exceptional?

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  • Article

The birth of the public museum

| Elissavet Ntoulia

The first public museums evolved from wealthy collectors’ cabinets of curiosities and were quickly recognised as useful vehicles for culture.

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  • Article

Robinson Crusoe and the morality of solitude

| Professor Barbara Taylor

Robinson Crusoe, fiction’s most famous castaway, was certainly isolated, but did he suffer the intrinsically modern affliction of loneliness?