- Photo story
- Photo story
Obesity and Britain’s boys
Six young men and six experiences of being overweight. Find out how these boys and their loved ones feel about this stigmatising issue.
- 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
The secret lives of Britain’s first Black physicians
Dr Annabel Sowemimo explores the web of connections between early Black British doctors, the role of empire in West Africa and the pernicious reach of scientific racism.
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- Article
Making sunstroke insanity
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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- Article
The child whose town rejected vaccines
Gloucester, 1896. Ethel Cromwell is taken ill at the height of Britain’s last great smallpox epidemic.
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- Article
Intelligence testing, race and eugenics
Specious ideas and assumptions about intelligence that were born during the great flourishing of eugenics well over 100 years ago still inform the British education system today, as Nazlin Bhimani reveals.
- Book extract
- Book extract
Why the NHS is worth saving
In this extract from his latest book, ‘Free For All’, Dr Gavin Francis poses challenging questions to be addressed if a health service that’s free for all at the point of use is to remain possible.
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- Article
Children in burns prevention campaigns
Whose responsibility is it to prevent accidental burns and scalds in the home? Shane Ewen’s research shows that it’s everyone’s concern.
- Article
- Article
Hyperfocus and hobbies
Alex Chan talks about the power of ADHD-associated hyperfocus and how they’ve become wary of feeding it too often.
- Article
- Article
Dealing with the dead after a nuclear attack
Cold War-era predictions of death on a vast scale became routine. But the British authorities were less prepared to dispose of the bodies.
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- Article
Medics and the bomb
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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- Article
The psychological impact of nuclear war
How would you hold up psychologically if a nuclear bomb was dropped? Discover the British government’s secret predictions from the 1980s.
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- Article
Do good mothers make good democracy?
To be psychologically fit for democracy, one distinguished paediatrician argued that you need a ‘good enough mother’ – and that we must acknowledge the bad side of our feelings.
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- Article
How slums make people sick
A newly gentrified corner of Bermondsey leaves little clue to its less salubrious history. But a few intrepid writers recorded the details of existence in one of London’s most squalid slums.
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- Article
The colonist who faced the blue terror
India, 1857. In a British enclave, Katherine Bartrum watches her friend, and then her family, succumb to the deadly cholera.
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- Article
Why pandemic denial is nothing new
Could today’s Covid-deniers be taking lessons from history? After all, it’s nearly 200 years since frustrations at a cholera-induced lockdown erupted in Sunderland.
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- Article
Lindsey Fitzharris’s prescription for writing
The Wellcome Book Prize shortlisted author of ‘The Butchering Art’ answers five questions on health, inspiration and storytelling.
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- Article
Booze and bad behaviour
Our love of alcohol is like a party that’s lasted nine centuries. But there are signs that the demon drink is losing its appeal.
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- Article
Born in the NHS
Despite underfunding, strikes and scandals, the first two decades of the 2000s has seen the British people’s love of and loyalty to the NHS soar.
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- Article
Building resilience in a racist world
With the resurgence of racism in today’s UK, Louisa Adjoa Parker reflects on the trauma of growing up in a racist society and explores how victims could begin to heal.
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- Article
The unearthly children of science fiction’s Cold War
In the 1950s a new figure emerged in British novels, film and television: a disturbing young alien that revealed postwar society’s fear of the unruly power of teenagers.
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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
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.
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- Article
Milk trails round Euston
Where cows once grazed near Wellcome Collection in London, baristas now froth their milk. Esther Leslie uncovers Euston’s dairy-based urban history.
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- Article
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.