Wellcome uses cookies.

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

Thomas Sankara and the stomachs that made themselves heard

| Perry BlanksonAnna Keville Joyce

Thomas Sankara’s vision to transform farming and health in Burkina Faso turned to dust with his assassination. Perry Blankson highlights the considerable achievements of Sankara’s brief span in power.

  • 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.

  • 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

Dealing with the dead after a nuclear attack

| Taras Young

Cold War-era predictions of death on a vast scale became routine. But the British authorities were less prepared to dispose of the bodies.

  • Article
  • Article

NHS Blue: the colour of universal healthcare

| Cal Flyn

The 1980s and 1990s saw ideas from the world of business infiltrating the NHS, including the introduction of an internal market, followed by a corporate branding exercise.

  • Article
  • Article

Intelligence testing, race and eugenics

| Nazlin BhimaniGergo Varga

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.

  • Article
  • Article

People against pollution

| Alice BellAlberto Casias

Alice Bell reflects on what happens when communities help solve environmental problems, and whether citizen science can help fight industrial pollution today.

  • Article
  • Article

How to thrive in lockdown

| Gareth BerlinerCarrie Ravenscroft

Gareth Berliner shares how being a Disabled person has given him the resilience and motivation to find a new creative challenge during lockdown.

  • Article
  • Article

Delusional recycling and the problem with plastic

| Arianne ShahvisiIfada Nisa

Many of us are guilty of wishful thinking when it comes to our rubbish. Arianne Shahvisi exposes shaky recycling infrastructure and overseas dumping, arguing for an end to waste colonialism.

  • Article
  • Article

When you can’t return home

| Gail TolleyMaria Rivans

Migrants and refugees cannot choose to return home, so homesickness becomes a profound and long-lasting feeling. This powerful force infuses migrant cultures, and is rarely given the serious attention it warrants.

  • Article
  • Article

Remote romance and the common cold

| Elena CarterThomas S G Farnetti

Getting creatively romantic due to a virus sounds all too contemporary, but our archives show what socially distanced seduction looked like seven decades ago.

  • Article
  • Article

Inhaling happiness and gasping for a high

| Stevyn Colgan

The rapid, short-lived high we get from whippets, reefers and vapes can be accompanied by long-term health consequences. The search is on for safer ways to get stoned.

  • 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.

  • Long read
  • Long read

Primodos, paternalism and the fight to be heard

| Florence WildbloodKathleen Arundell

Journalist Florence Wildblood examines the case of Primodos – a conveniently quick but risky hormone pregnancy test that was prescribed in the 1960s and ’70s – and profiles two women at the story’s shocking heart.