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59 results
  • Article
  • Article

Disability, education and prejudice

| Ruth BlueHollie Chastain

In the 1960s and 1970s, thalidomide survivors had to fight for a proper education. If they weren’t brought up in institutions, they were often viewed as objects of curiosity, encountering verbal and sometimes physical abuse, both at school and in the world beyond.

  • In pictures
  • In pictures

Responses to Brook’s sex education guides

| Caroline Rusterholz

Brook Advisory Centres provided relatable sex-education information to young people, but their popular material sometimes resulted in criticism from politicians and the media.

  • In pictures
  • In pictures

How an animation educated the army

| Perside Ndandu

In a 1940s cartoon intended to persuade US troops to take malaria medication, the makers pitted a clodhopping soldier against a wily mosquito. If only Private SNAFU had followed the government’s advice.

  • Article
  • 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
  • Article

Mask, ritual and fertility

| Chimwemwe PhiriSteven Pocock

Today many of us learn about fertility, conception and pregnancy online. But that wasn’t always the way. Discover how masks and rituals played an important educational role.

  • Article
  • Article

Eugenics and the welfare state

| Indy BhullarGergo Varga

Indy Bhullar explores the ideas of William Beveridge and Richard Titmuss, who were strongly influenced by eugenic thinking, and yet championed the idea of the welfare state.

  • Article
  • 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.

  • Article
  • Article

Acting, disableism and inclusive theatre

| Jamie HaleKirsten IrvingPatrick Baldwin

Deaf theatre director Jenny Sealey discusses inclusivity, community and the resilience of disabled actors.

  • Article
  • Article

Acid and the sexual psychonauts

| Alex DymockBen MechenLeah Moyle

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

  • Article
  • Article

Sex work and critical campaigners

| Ella SmithJessa Fairbrother

When campaigners filmed secretly in the club where she worked, exotic dancer Ella Smith felt frightened and degraded. Here she speaks out about the attack on her livelihood.

  • Article
  • Article

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?

  • Article
  • Article

Care, creativity and a connected world

| Christine Ro

Find out about the challenges Wellcome Collection has faced during the last very demanding year.

  • Article
  • Article

Sun salutations and yoga synthesis in India

| Lalita Kaplish

Surya namaskars, or sun salutations, have a long history in South Asia, but their place at the heart of modern yoga is more recent.

  • Article
  • 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?

  • Article
  • Article

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.

  • Article
  • Article

Artificial intelligence and the dream of eternal life

| Giovanni TisoThomas S G Farnetti

Until now, eternal life was the stuff of fiction, or in the unknowable realms of religion. But an artificial intelligence that ‘remembers’ the whole of an individual’s experience could be the way to life after death.

  • 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.

  • Interview
  • Interview

Sniffing glue and Scientology in the DrugScope archive

| Gwendolyn Smith

Academics on hallucinogenics, kids sniffing glue, and Scientologists recruiting drug users keen to kick the habit. Delve into Wellcome’s recently acquired DrugScope archive.

  • Article
  • Article

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.

  • Article
  • Article

Charged bodies

| Ruth Garde

Electrified humans brought education and performance together with a spark in the 18th century.

  • Article
  • Article

‘Jessy’, a film about cerebral palsy

| Anthony McKay

How the 1950s British film industry portrayed this disease.

  • Article
  • Article

Keeping death close

| Lauren EntwistleShay Azzari

Scattering her father’s ashes, Lauren Entwistle found herself longing for something physical that proved he once was a living, breathing person. Here she reflects on the objects that help us to grieve and remember.

  • Photo story
  • Photo story

Trans masculinity on the record

| E-J ScottThomas S G Farnetti

Curator of the Museum of Transology in Brighton E-J Scott tells the story behind a few of the 250 objects from the collection, and the powerful effect they had on him as he put trans lives on the record.

  • Article
  • Article

Mapping the body

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

  • Article
  • Article

Sex in graphic novels

| Stephen Lowther

Sex and sexuality have long been explored in the history of the graphic novel.