Wellcome uses cookies.

Read our policy
Wellcome Collection homepage
All
Stories
Images
Catalogue
Events
48 results
  • Article
  • Article

Children in burns prevention campaigns

| Shane Ewen

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

Found items

| Paul HornThomas S G Farnetti

Books leave their traces in our minds, but we leave traces of ourselves in books too, as these fascinating items found inside old works show.

  • Article
  • Article

Guerrilla public health

| Harry Shapiro

From safe-use guides to needle exchange schemes, Harry Shapiro reflects on 40 years of drug harm reduction in the UK.

  • Article
  • Article

The child whose town rejected vaccines

| Anna Faherty

Gloucester, 1896. Ethel Cromwell is taken ill at the height of Britain’s last great smallpox epidemic.

  • Article
  • Article

The conditional child

| Deanna Fei

Deanna Fei asks what it means to sustain a life, drawing on her own experience of having a premature baby as well as an 18th-century essay.

  • Article
  • Article

The psychological impact of nuclear war

| Taras Young

How would you hold up psychologically if a nuclear bomb was dropped? Discover the British government’s secret predictions from the 1980s.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

A history of sex for sale

| Dr Kate ListerSteven Pocock

Kate Lister’s cultural history of the sex trade puts sex workers centre stage. In this extract, she argues why the way we write, think and talk about sex work matters.

  • Article
  • Article

The first seizure

| Aparna NairTracy Satchwill

Historian Aparna Nair had her first seizure when she was 11. Here she recalls that first time, and how other people’s reactions are sometimes the most disturbing part about having a seizure.

  • Article
  • Article

Thalidomide, a bitter pill

| Ruth BlueHollie Chastain

Hear from some of the women who took the drug thalidomide over sixty years ago about the fear, isolation and grief that they experienced as the appalling pharmaceutical scandal unfolded around them.

  • Article
  • Article

Getting under the skin

| Taryn Cain

Before the invention of X-ray in 1895 there was really only one way to accurately study the human body, and that was to cut it open.

  • Article
  • Article

Going viral in the online anti-vaccine wars

| Alex Green

‘Anti-vaxxers’ are taking their message online using powerful images as well as words. But is the pro campaigners’ response any better?

  • Article
  • Article

Journeying home

| Chris North

A serious health scare was the catalyst to Chris beginning the process of understanding his experiences more clearly, and using that new insight to help other intersex people.

  • Article
  • Article

When skin bleaching goes wrong

| Ngunan AdamuAmaal Said

Warnings about permanent health damage don’t deter those using skin-bleaching products for years on end. Read the story of one woman who suffered from liver failure after years of striving to be paler.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

Your gut’s instincts

| Elsa RichardsonSteven Pocock

Cultural historian Elsa Richardson explores the stomach’s influence over our emotions, and why trusting your gut is often good advice.

  • 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 birth of Britain's National Health Service

| Cal Flyn

Starkly unequal access to healthcare gave rise to Nye Bevan’s creation of a truly national health service.

  • Article
  • Article

Providing care across languages

| Niyoshi ShahRanganath Krishnamani

When medics are taught in English but their patients speak other languages, effective communication becomes fraught. Niyoshi Shah explores the linguistic gaps between patient and doctor.

  • Article
  • Article

Why even plastic surgery can’t hide you from facial recognition

| Sharrona PearlSteven Pocock

Once upon a time, plastic surgery allowed a few notorious criminals to evade the law. But today, sophisticated facial-recognition technology has turned dreams of anonymity to dust.

  • Article
  • Article

Families fighting for justice

| Ruth BlueHollie Chastain

In 1962 a group of parents whose children had been affected by thalidomide began a decades-long battle in the law courts, the media and Parliament in order to win fair justice for all thalidomide survivors.

  • Article
  • Article

Notes on need

| Johanna HedvaNaki Narh

Writing about bodies, and hearing the stories of others’ bodies, Johanna Hedva also heard, over and over, how people blame themselves – and are encouraged to do this – for illness and disability.

  • Article
  • Article

Two health centres, two ideologies

| Emily Sargent

Two futuristic, light-filled buildings aimed to bring forward-looking healthcare to city dwellers. But the principles behind each were very different.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

Permission to recover

| Gavin FrancisSteven Pocock

When it comes to illness, sometimes the end is just the beginning. Gavin Francis argues why being given permission to recover is so important.

  • Article
  • Article

Six personal health zines that might change your life

| Loesja VigourNicola Cook

Personal zines put health conditions back in the hands of the people who experience them. Here are six that Wellcome Collection staff love.