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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.
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Would you like to buy a dinosaur?
Two remarkable letters and a drawing of a plesiosaur by Mary Anning offer a tantalising portal into the exciting world of fossil hunting and discovery of the 1800s.
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The prostitute whose pox inspired feminists
Fitzrovia, 1875. A woman recorded only as A.G. enters hospital and is diagnosed with syphilis.
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The father of handwashing
Doctors performing autopsies and then delivering babies – with not a hint of soap in between – was the grim recipe producing a lot of motherless offspring in the 1800s. But one man’s gargantuan efforts to upend accepted medical thinking turned the tide.
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Life before assistive technology
When an inherited condition caused Alex Lee’s vision to deteriorate, he began to discover the technologies that would help him navigate the world around him. Here he describes how his life began to change.
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How do advertisers get inside our heads?
Vance Packard exposed techniques of mass manipulation developed by 1950s advertisers that are still at work today in the age of big data.
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Bloody capitalism and the cash flow of the menstrual cycle
Once they thrived on taboos and shame. Now period-product manufacturers are finding new ways to flourish in this era of period activism – but products aren’t the end of the story.
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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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The hell of hay fever
After years suffering in silence, David Jesudason finds speaking out about his pollen allergy gives him hope for a future where his hay-fever symptoms are under control.
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Disability, education and prejudice
In the 1960s and 1970s, thalidomide survivors had to fight for a proper education. If they weren’t brought up in institutions, they were often viewed as objects of curiosity, encountering verbal and sometimes physical abuse, both at school and in the world beyond.
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The poor child’s nurse
Charming family scenes in Victorian ads for children’s medicines were at odds with some of the dangerous ingredients they contained.
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The law of periodicity for menstruation
Dr Edward Clarke's Law of Periodicity claimed that females who were educated alongside their male peers were developing their minds at the expense of their reproductive organs.
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Cocaine, the Victorian wonder drug
Today, cocaine has a very poor public image as one of the causes of crime and violence. But for the Victorians it was welcomed as the saviour of modern surgery.
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- Book extract
The 200-year search for normal people
Sarah Chaney poses the question we’ve likely all asked at some point in our lives: 'Am I normal?’, and explores whether normality even exists.
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Natural eating in Jamaica and the Caribbean
Riaz Phillips is passionate about the Jamaican food he grew up with and plant-based Caribbean food he came to later, like roti, baiganee and vegan stews and curries. Here he explores the origins and surging popularity of these natural ‘health foods’.