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29 results
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  • Article

Why the world needs collectors

| Anna Faherty

Those who collect play an important role as “facilitators of curiosity”, says Anna Faherty.

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  • Book extract

Eating their own kind

In his grisly history of cannibalism, zoologist Bill Schutt asks what drives an animal to feast on its own flesh and blood.

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The quest to breed gifted children

| Anna Faherty

If you had the chance, would you choose a genius baby?

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Talent, tech and visual art

| Jamie HaleKirsten Irving

Jamie Hale finds a combination of talent and technology are crucial when it comes to creating great visual art, but how do you keep working when your circumstances are in constant flux?

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The secrets your teeth hold

| Michael A Berthaume

Discover how innocuous-looking human teeth hold a wealth of hidden information about our diet, health and evolution.

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The intimate and invasive art of ethical taxidermy

| Helen BabbsThomas S G Farnetti

Does displaying dead animals bring us closer to nature, or drive us further apart?

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Nymphomania and hypersexuality in women and men

| Taryn Cain

The history of nymphomania is closely bound with society's views on women and their sexuality.

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Seeds for the future

| Nataly Allasi CanalesCat O’Neil

Indigenous groups have a key role as guardians of biodiversity, and their knowledge could help us all preserve our world. To survive, we all need to collaborate, reject prejudice, and share what we know.

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Restoring disorder to ‘The Book of Disquiet’

| Helen Babbs

Printer Tim Hopkins explains what making an extraordinary new edition of Fernando Pessoa’s book revealed about both the text and the mind.

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A quick guide to drugs, the brain and brain chemistry

| Barry J Gibb

Discover some of the major chemicals that govern activity in our brains, how they work, and why certain drugs have the effects they do.

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An animated almanac for the modern world

| Thomas Coleman

Discover why Thomas Coleman wanted to make a medieval folding almanac relevant to the modern world and see the film for yourself.

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Are people born violent?

| Laura BuiJessa Fairbrother

Laura Bui explores how the nature vs nurture debate applies to those who commit homicide.

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Being trans in the world of sex work

| Dr Adrienne MacartneyJessa Fairbrother

Unstable. Predatory. Risk takers. Dr Adrienne Macartney sheds stark light on the hostile and negative assumptions faced by trans sex workers.

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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.

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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.

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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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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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Maria McKinney on ‘Sire’

| Maria McKinney

All my grandparents were farmers; I grew up in the countryside surrounded by farms and helped neighbours herd sheep and cattle into the field. My body of work called ‘Sire’ looks at the genomics of modern cattle breeding.

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Rag mags and monthly issues: Five period zines to stop you seeing red

| Nicola CookLoesja Vigour

Using humour, personal experience and political activism to explore the bloody reality of menstruation.

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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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Dress and the magic of touch

| Shahidha BariMaryam Wahid

Fashion, of course, is largely about appearance, but the feeling of clothes on your skin is a complex sensory experience. Shahidha Bari contemplates the human connections in the business of creating and wearing clothes.

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Robinson Crusoe and the morality of solitude

| Professor Barbara Taylor

Robinson Crusoe, fiction’s most famous castaway, was certainly isolated, but did he suffer the intrinsically modern affliction of loneliness?

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NHS strikes and the decade of discontent

| Cal Flyn

When the social unrest of the 1970s spread to the NHS, dissatisfied staff challenged the status quo for the first time in quarter of a century.

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Crime drama and the realistic cadaver

| Hildegunn M S TraaSteven Pocock

Today we are accustomed to the increasingly realistic look of dead bodies in on-screen dramas. Special-effects expert Hildegunn M S Traa reveals how crime and morgue scenes reflect the social idea of death.

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Can our sexual desires be transformed?

| Charlie WilliamsSarah MarksDaniel Pick

In the 1950s, many psychiatrists thought that homosexuality could be reformed. One found that it couldn’t – and his discoveries led to a change in the law.