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How the Peckham Experiment inspired my fiction

Find out how an unruly mass of archive material from a 1930s radical health centre has inspired brand new writing.

A shared experience

Having a simple conversation with another person brings such pleasure.

Uncovering experiences of dementia

Focusing on three 19th-century women’s case notes, Millie van der Byl Williams explores how our definition of dementia has changed.

How to thrive in lockdown

Gareth Berliner shares how being a Disabled person has given him the resilience and motivation to find a new creative challenge during lockdown.

Our Covid complicity

Athena Stevens thought she had a cold that she tried to ignore, but it turned out to be Covid-19. Here she reflects on how we have all put ourselves and others at risk with the choices we’ve made during this pandemic.

Society, not Covid-19, makes us vulnerable

Rick Burgess coped with the death of his mother in February 2020 by immersing himself in the task of protecting his community from Covid-19 and challenging the government's failure to protect and support elderly and Disabled people during the pandemic.

Caring for our Disabled daughter in lockdown

Jane Holmes talks about the challenges of caring for her Disabled daughter while working and trying to stay safe during the pandemic.

Lying low for lockdown and beyond

For Liz Carr the chances of catching Covid-19 are the same as for anyone else, but as a Disabled person she's at much greater risk of not getting the treatment she needs if she falls ill.

Two health centres, two ideologies

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

When self-deception becomes global hoax

Being deceived isn’t always a case of believing someone else’s lie. Experiments have shown that many of us can be manipulated into accepting our own fictions as true.

Desperate housewives and suburban neurosis

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

Acid and the sexual psychonauts

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

Finding solidarity in arachnophobia

Arachnophobia is very different from just disliking spiders. Izzie Price shares the reality of having the phobia, and explores its likely origins.

The ‘epileptic’ in art and science

From scarred outsiders in literature to the cold voyeurism of medical films and photography, people who experience seizures and epilepsy are rarely shown in a compassionate light in popular culture.

‘My Hair Is Not…’

Eight Black people talk about their relationship with their hair – their hairstyle history, their experiences, and how they decided to have natural hair.

The Migraine Art Competition Collection

The Migraine Art Competition ran for seven years in the 1980s and resulted in over 500 unique and striking works of art that represent what it means to live with migraine.

Resolve

Bidisha chats to her guests about their personal experiences of resolve, and considers its complicated relationship to happiness.

Daria Martin on ‘Sensorium Tests’ and ‘At the Threshold’

A reflection on art in a mental hospital

Artist Beth Hopkins explains how she used her experience of researching the Adamson Collection to create an embroidered wall hanging.

Six personal health zines that might change your life

Personal zines put health conditions back in the hands of the people who experience them. Here are six that Wellcome Collection staff love.

The leukaemia diagnosis I didn’t see coming

Treatment for leukaemia kept journalist Hannah Partos in isolation, like the female prisoner whose image inspired her to write this piece.

Homesick for planet Earth

Find out how homesick astronauts spend their free time, and how recreating home cooking from freeze-dried ingredients can cheer them all up.

The solidarity of sickness

Visiting an injured friend in hospital prompts writer Sinéad Gleeson to reflect on the instant rapport forged between compatriots in the kingdom of the sick.

The rise and fall of a medical mesmerist

Uncover the fascinating story of the doctor who popularised hypnotism as a medical technique, and could name Dickens among his famous friends.

Face to face with acne

Vivid depictions of 19th-century acne patients in dermatologists’ “skin atlases” leave a contemporary acne sufferer wondering if their experiences were similar to hers.