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220 results
  • Book extract
  • Book extract

“I’ve never talked to anybody about this before”

Douglas is furious. He’s at crisis point and needs help. Read the first of his two sessions with psychoanalyst Susie Orbach.

  • Article
  • Article

The Key to Memory: Mark it out

Sarah Bentley explores what a papier-mâché figure from Japan can tell us about how and why we remember.

  • Article
  • Article

Are doctors medical detectives?

| Jules MontagueJohn R A Smith

Do doctors really identify medical conditions in the same way that detectives solve crimes? Neurologist Jules Montague makes her diagnosis.

  • Photo story
  • Photo story

Trans masculinity on the record

| E-J ScottThomas S G Farnetti

Curator of the Museum of Transology in Brighton E-J Scott tells the story behind a few of the 250 objects from the collection, and the powerful effect they had on him as he put trans lives on the record.

  • Article
  • Article

Public health campaigns and the ‘threat’ of disability

| Aparna Nair

By continuing to represent disability as the feared outcome of disease, public health campaigns help to perpetuate prejudice against disabled people.

  • Article
  • Article

Photographs as evidence of gender identity and sexuality

| Dr Jana Funke

Intriguing photographs from sexologists’ archives suggest they could have helped people explore their gender identity and sexuality.

  • Article
  • Article

What is violence?

| Laura BuiJessa Fairbrother

Criminologist Laura Bui explores her early understanding of violence and outlines its definition and wider consequences.

  • Article
  • Article

Good animals, bad humans?

| Simon Jarrett

Could an animal be more evolved than a human? Victorian psychologists thought that in some cases the answer could be ‘yes’.

  • Article
  • Article

Charged bodies

| Ruth Garde

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

  • Article
  • Article

The Key to Memory: Follow your nose

Elissavet Ntoulia explores what a pair of pomanders can tell us about how and why we remember.

  • Article
  • Article

Sun salutations and yoga synthesis in India

| Lalita Kaplish

Surya namaskars, or sun salutations, have a long history in South Asia, but their place at the heart of modern yoga is more recent.

  • Article
  • Article

The eye of darshan

| Adrian Plau

The Hindu concept of darshan means “divine revelation”, but it’s also about the multilayered ways in which we see the world around us. Adrian Plau explains how one image in a Panjabi manuscript relates to darshan, and why it’s so striking.

  • Article
  • Article

Native Americans through the 19th-century lens

| Allison C Meier

The stories behind Rinehart's photographs may not be as black and white as they first appear.

  • Article
  • Article

Dirt, disease and the Inspector of Nuisances

| Kristen den Hartog

In the days when ‘bad air’ was thought to spread disease, dozens of Inspectors of Nuisances ceaselessly struggled against the perils of dirt – both visible and invisible.

  • Article
  • Article

Tragic artists and their all-consuming passions

| Anna Faherty

Does having a debilitating disease help or hinder creative genius?

  • Article
  • Article

The meanings of hurt

| Alanna SkuseSteven Pocock

In the early modern period, gruesome incidents of self-castration and other types of self-injury garnished the literature of the time. Alanna Skuse explores the messages these wounds conveyed.

  • Article
  • Article

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.

  • Article
  • Article

Ginger’s role in cures and courtroom battles

| Alice White

Some people will use a dose of ginger to help with hangovers – but it hasn’t always been a friend to the thirsty.

  • Article
  • Article

Parks and politics in Brixton’s past and present

| Jacqueline L ScottYvonne Maxwell

Gentrification is creeping along Railton Road, but racial inequality still lingers in memories of the 1980s, and in the continuing lack of green-space access.

  • Article
  • Article

Ancestry, privacy and the family tree

| Tanya PerdikouNaomi Vona

Wanting to find out more about her Jamaican grandfather, Tanya Perdikou contemplates DNA testing. But first she has to consider the potential impact of unexpected results.

  • Article
  • Article

How do advertisers get inside our heads?

| Charlie WilliamsSarah MarksDaniel Pick

Vance Packard exposed techniques of mass manipulation developed by 1950s advertisers that are still at work today in the age of big data.

  • Article
  • Article

Active pensioners, blooming gardens

| Kate WilkinsonLaurindo Feliciano

To reach your 70s with over 300,000 Twitter followers or running a music festival is not the stereotypical image of retirement. But does this energetic engagement with life equal happiness?

  • Article
  • Article

Indian botanicals and heritage wars

| Sita Reddy

Colonial botanical texts, as astonishingly beautiful as they are, may cast very dark shadows.

  • Article
  • Article

A reflection on art in a mental hospital

| Beth Hopkins

Artist Beth Hopkins explains how she used her experience of researching the Adamson Collection to create an embroidered wall hanging.

  • Article
  • Article

Black pepper to fuel fiery fights and cure haemorrhoids

| Alice White

This common condiment was once very valuable and, until surprisingly recently, used as a versatile medicine.