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87 results
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London, city of lost hospitals

| Dr Tom BoltonSimon Norfolk

Come on the trail of hundreds of ghost hospitals, whose remnants hold clues to medical treatments of the past.

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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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Foraging for a taste of the past

| Wross LawrenceMarco Kesseler

Follow tips from a professional forager to recreate delicious 18th-century recipes from plants growing wild in parks and on urban wasteland.

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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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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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The girl with no name

| Paul Craddock

When a now anonymous teenager sold her tooth for transplant, she couldn’t have predicted that she’d end up at the heart of a troubling story about 18th-century beauty ideals.

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Duelling doctors

| Russell Moul

An enduring enthusiasm for 18th-century gentlemen to defend their ‘honour’ by duelling placed doctors in a delicate position. Specially when they faced being shot themselves.

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The bishop’s profitable sex workers

| Dr Kate Lister

How did the Church rake in revenue from 14th-century sex regulations? Kate Lister explores a bishop’s lucrative rulebook.

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How slums make people sick

| Emily Sargent

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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Eugenics and the welfare state

| Indy BhullarGergo Varga

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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How tuberculosis became a test case for eugenic theory

| Hannah CornishGergo Varga

A 19th-century collaboration that failed to prove how facial features could indicate the diseases people were most likely to suffer from became a significant stepping stone in the new ‘science’ of eugenics.

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Louis Wain’s cryptic cats

| Bryony Benge-Abbott

Once famous for his quirky cat illustrations, today Louis Wain is often portrayed as a ‘psychotic’ artist whose illness can be mapped out through his drawings. Here Bryony Benge-Abbott takes a more rounded view.

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Eels and feels

| Ruth Garde

For Georgian Londoners, the allure of electric animals was both intellectual and sensual.

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Thunderbolts and lightning

| Ruth Garde

Fire in the sky has always exerted a hold on our imagination, even as early scientists unlocked the secrets of atmospheric electricity.

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There’s more to gingerbread than ginger

| Mary-Anne Boermans

‘Bake-Off’ finalist Mary-Anne Boermans treats us to the warm and enticing pleasures of gingerbread over centuries.

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How to rehabilitate the concrete jungle

| Owen HatherleyJess Nash

A huge concrete housing estate from the 1960s, now seen as an ecological mistake, is being drastically redeveloped, compounding the environmental errors. Owen Hatherley posits a more creative solution.

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The tower in fiction, film and life

| Emily Sargent

The high-rise estates born of postwar idealism soon became symbols of crime and squalor. But after one terrible tragedy, public bodies are being forced to rethink our towers.

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Building a dream in the garden suburbs

| Emily Sargent

In the late 19th century a ‘garden suburb’ promised a retreat from London’s dirt and crowds. See how this new concept was developed to appeal to the health concerns of the literary classes.

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Natural eating in Jamaica and the Caribbean

| Riaz PhillipsAnna Keville Joyce

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’.

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Remote diagnosis from wee to the Web

| Christine RoSteven Pocock

Medical practice might have moved on from when patients posted flasks of their urine for doctors to taste, but telehealth today keeps up the tradition of remote diagnosis – to our possible detriment.

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The making of ‘Quacks’

| Helen Babbs

How do you create a medical comedy that’s authentic and laugh-out-loud funny?

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The current that kills

| Ruth Garde

In the 19th century, electricity held life in the balance, with the power to execute – or reanimate.

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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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When monarchs healed the sick

| Rita YatesSteven Pocock

Our current Queen fortunately doesn’t have to spend hours laying hands on the sick to cure them. But it was a different story for monarchs of the early modern era, whose touch was a sought-after treatment for scrofula.