- Article
- Article
The birth of Britain's National Health Service
Starkly unequal access to healthcare gave rise to Nye Bevan’s creation of a truly national health service.
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- Article
Befriending heavy breathers
Read the fascinating story behind the rare manual that helped volunteers on one of Britain’s first free telephone helplines to deal with masturbating callers.
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- Article
London, city of lost hospitals
Come on the trail of hundreds of ghost hospitals, whose remnants hold clues to medical treatments of the past.
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- Article
Graphic battles in pharmacy
James Morison’s campaign against the medical establishment inspired a wave of caricatures mocking his quack medicine.
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- Article
Designing better mental health wards
Bringing colour and natural light to tired, grubby mental health wards has a measurably positive effect on patients. A few groundbreaking projects are showing the way.
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- Article
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.
- Article
- Article
Eugenics and the welfare state
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.
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- Article
Why the 1918 Spanish flu defied both memory and imagination
The Black Death, AIDS and Ebola outbreaks are part of our collective cultural memory, but the Spanish flu outbreak has not been.
- Article
- Article
How music opens the doors of memory and the mind
People living with dementia can often still listen, perform or move to music. What does this tell us about how memories are formed?
- Long read
- Long read
Primodos, paternalism and the fight to be heard
Journalist Florence Wildblood examines the case of Primodos – a conveniently quick but risky hormone pregnancy test that was prescribed in the 1960s and ’70s – and profiles two women at the story’s shocking heart.
- Long read
- Long read
Rehab centres and the ‘cure’ for addiction
Guy Stagg takes us on a brief history of rehab centres and their approaches to addiction and recovery.