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45 results
  • 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.

  • Article
  • Article

Eugenics and the welfare state

| Indy BhullarGergo Varga

Indy Bhullar explores the ideas of William Beveridge and Richard Titmuss, who were strongly influenced by eugenic thinking, and yet championed the idea of the welfare state.

  • 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.

  • Photo story
  • Photo story

Portraits, from a distance

| Michelle Sank

Join photographer Michelle Sank on her daily walk around Exeter. Strength, frustration, resilience and eccentricity all show in these candid images portraying life under the constraints of coronavirus lockdown.

  • Article
  • Article

The current that kills

| Ruth Garde

In the 19th century, electricity held life in the balance, with the power to execute – or reanimate.

  • Article
  • Article

Drawing the human animal

| Allison C Meier

We might try to deny our animal instincts, but this series of extraordinary 17th-century drawings suggests they are only too apparent.

  • 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 Martians are coming

| Charlotte SleighGergo Varga

For over a hundred years, antagonistic alien invaders have been a popular focus for the imagined end of the world. But the destructive consequences of human behaviour is far more frightening.

  • Article
  • Article

Pain and the power of activism

| Jaipreet VirdiAnne Howeson

Today, women with endometriosis have more access to better information than ever before. Jaipreet Virdi applauds the shared stories, online communities and self-help books empowering women in pain.

  • 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

The joys and failures of audio description

| Alex LeeIan Treherne

Audio description enhances the experience of watching a film or TV show for people with a visual impairment, but it's not widely available in the UK. Alex Lee explains why.

  • Article
  • Article

The work of wet-nursing

| Alev ScottVicky Scott

Many of us know that in the past, babies were sometimes nourished by wet-nurses. But, perhaps surprisingly, the practice continues today – and the milk recipients are not only babies.

  • Article
  • Article

The shock of cardiac arrest when you’re young and fit

| Meg FozzardCat O’Neil

Footballer Christian Eriksen’s on-pitch collapse in 2020, witnessed by thousands, was shocking. Fellow cardiac-arrest survivor Meg Fozzard explores the risks in the young and fit, and how we can all help.

  • 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

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

The yogi as hermit, warrior, criminal and showman

| Lalita Kaplish

How the modern world changed the life and reputation of the yogi.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

Renaissance women and their killer cosmetics

| Jill BurkeSteven Pocock

In this extract from ‘How to be a Renaissance Woman’, Jill Burke delves into a complex world of beauty products, poison and patriarchy – and reveals the impossible contradictions of femininity faced by 16th-century women.

  • 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.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

“It wasn’t an accident that I came to you”

Douglas meets psychoanalyst Susie Orbach for a follow-up session, ahead of delivering a difficult verdict.

  • Article
  • Article

The life and death of Tamagotchi and the virtual pet

| Jenna Jovi

Discover how the 1990s craze for Tamagotchis became a flood of robotic and virtual pets, sending their owners on an emotional rollercoaster ride.