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Medics and the bomb

| Taras Young

Would a nuclear attack on the UK overwhelm the NHS? At the height of the Cold War, despite government optimism, medics predicted doom.

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Fees, funding and the NHS

| Cal Flyn

In the 1950s, dramatic political battles over NHS charges brought down a government. But public confidence in the service still grew.

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Epidemic threats and racist legacies

| Jacob Steere-WilliamsDark Matter

Epidemiology is the systematic, data-driven study of health and disease in populations. But as historian Jacob Steere-Williams suggests, this most scientific of fields emerged in the 19th century imbued with a doctrine of Western imperialism – a legacy that continues to influence how we talk about disease.

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Social isolation and the search for sanctuary

| Furaha AsaniGhazal ZargarBenjamin Gilbert

Threatened with deportation, Furaha Asani turned to her church for support. Met with silence and disinterest, she walked away, but argues that churches should do much more for migrants.

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The birth of Britain's National Health Service

| Cal Flyn

Starkly unequal access to healthcare gave rise to Nye Bevan’s creation of a truly national health service.

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Making sunstroke insanity

| Kristin D HusseyGergo Varga

Medical historian Dr Kristin Hussey takes a closer look at sunstroke and mental illness, and how, in the late 19th century, they connected at the crossroads of colonial science and the idea of whiteness.

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Jim, the horse of death

| Chris Baker

Horses’ blood was used to produce an antitoxin that saved thousands of children from dying from diphtheria, but contamination was a deadly problem. Find out how a horse called Jim was the catalyst for the beginnings of medical regulation.

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Life lessons across the digital divide

| Adele WaltonSteven Pocock

What could 86-year-old Tony teach 20-something Adele as she showed him how to use his smartphone? Rather a lot about digital exclusion, it turns out.

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London, city of lost hospitals

| Dr Tom BoltonSimon Norfolk

Come on the trail of hundreds of ghost hospitals, whose remnants hold clues to medical treatments of the past.

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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.