Skip to main content
31 results
  • Article
  • Article

Yoga gets physical

| Lalita Kaplish

Modern yoga owes a debt to the physical culture movement that created a world obsessed with health and fitness.

  • 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

Booze and bad behaviour

| Stevyn Colgan

Our love of alcohol is like a party that’s lasted nine centuries. But there are signs that the demon drink is losing its appeal.

  • Article
  • Article

Yoga adapts to time and place

| Lalita Kaplish

A yoga teacher in 1930s India inspired today’s transnational practice with his spectacular fusion of tradition and innovation.

  • 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.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

Tracing the roots of our fears and fixations

| Kate SummerscaleTim Robinson

Kate Summerscale explores the history of our anxieties and compulsions, and the new phobias and manias that are always emerging.

  • Article
  • Article

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.

  • Article
  • Article

The art of soundproof design

| Kristin Hohenadel

Too much noise is more than annoying – it has serious negative effects on health and cognitive ability. Find out how designers and architects are mitigating the downsides of sound.

  • Article
  • Article

How architecture builds a profession of stress

| Kristin Hohenadel

Architects might produce buildings that enhance our health, but at what cost? Kristin Hohenadel explores architecture’s pressurised and stressful culture.

  • 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

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 prostitute whose pox inspired feminists

| Anna Faherty

Fitzrovia, 1875. A woman recorded only as A.G. enters hospital and is diagnosed with syphilis.

  • Article
  • Article

When self-deception becomes global hoax

| A R Hopwood

Being deceived isn’t always a case of believing someone else’s lie. Experiments have shown that many of us can be manipulated into accepting our own fictions as true.

  • Article
  • Article

Is it really OK to not be OK?

| James DownsMafalda Rakoš

Our mental healthcare system is still the poor relation of services that treat physical illness, and the pandemic has shone a spotlight on this situation. Campaigner James Downs argues for fundamental change.

  • Article
  • Article

How injury changed my brain

| Meg FozzardKathleen Arundell

Meg Fozzard, who experienced a brain injury in her 20s, writes about the huge impact it's had on her life, and talks to others with similar injuries.

  • Article
  • Article

A creative collaboration with compulsion

| Liz AtkinSteven Pocock

Discover how artist Liz Atkin has channelled the compulsion to pick her skin into an imaginative outlet for her feelings.

  • Article
  • Article

Sick of the theatre

| Michael Regnier

What makes the stage a good place to share real-life experiences of ill health?

  • Article
  • Article

Fighting shame by speaking out

| Lucia Osborne-CrowleyEduardo Rubio

Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s first instinct after being raped was to cover it up. Shame silenced her for ten years, but #MeToo gave her the courage to speak out.

  • Article
  • Article

The secret lives of Britain’s first Black physicians

| Annabel SowemimoGergo Varga

Dr Annabel Sowemimo explores the web of connections between early Black British doctors, the role of empire in West Africa and the pernicious reach of scientific racism.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

Naked, not nude

| Caroline VoutFunmi Lijadu

Classicist Caroline Vout argues that it’s time to take the dust covers off the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and to encounter their bodies not nude, but naked.

  • 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

How can we prevent violence?

| Laura BuiJessa Fairbrother

Evidence shows that strategies to prevent some types of violence can be very effective, while other, less well-acknowledged forms continue unabated. But hope can still guide us into a more peaceful future.

  • Article
  • Article

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.

  • Article
  • Article

A walk through other people’s expectations

| Caroline ButterwickSteven Pocock

The steep path isn’t the only thing Caroline Butterwick has to navigate on her Lakeland hike. Always aware of other people’s expectations, she continually monitors how her disability might seem to strangers.

  • Photo story
  • Photo story

‘Yes I am’ – voices of autistic women from minoritised communities

| Rosie Barnes

Rosie Barnes showcases the powerful voices of autistic women from minoritised communities as they talk about the specific and complex challenges they face.