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22 results
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The chymist’s trade card

| Julia Nurse

An 18th-century trade card reveals far more than its owner may have intended.

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Charged bodies

| Ruth Garde

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

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Printing the body

| Julia Nurse

The 18th century saw multiple technical developments in both printing and medicine. Colourful collaborations ensued – to the benefit of growing ranks of medical students.

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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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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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What is air, and how do we know?

| Hasok ChangTracy Satchwill

Watching bubbles in fermenting beer led 18th-century scientist Joseph Priestley to invent sparkling water – and to discover that different gases make up the air we breathe.

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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?

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The conditional child

| Deanna Fei

Deanna Fei asks what it means to sustain a life, drawing on her own experience of having a premature baby as well as an 18th-century essay.

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Drawing the human animal

| Allison C Meier

We might try to deny our animal instincts, but this series of extraordinary 17th-century drawings suggests they are only too apparent.

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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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Why the world needs collectors

| Anna Faherty

Those who collect play an important role as “facilitators of curiosity”, says Anna Faherty.

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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.

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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.

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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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The extraction of the excruciating bladder stones

| Thomas MorrisEmily Evans

Among those vying to find alternatives to major surgery for bladder stones, young doctor Jean Civiale stood out, painstakingly honing a method that was to become the norm.

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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 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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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.

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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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Theriac: An ancient brand?

| Briony Hudson

The name theriac survived for around for two millennia as a pharmaceutical term. But a ‘brand’ name is not always a guarantee of quality.

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Would you like to buy a unicorn?

| Cassidy Phillips

The story behind why somebody tried to sell Henry Wellcome a unicorn head in 1928.

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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