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15 results
  • Article
  • Article

Black pepper to fuel fiery fights and cure haemorrhoids

| Alice White

This common condiment was once very valuable and, until surprisingly recently, used as a versatile medicine.

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Chillies and the trouble with Scoville

| Danny Birchall

Measuring the heat of these peppers can leave you a little lukewarm.

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Ginger’s role in cures and courtroom battles

| Alice White

Some people will use a dose of ginger to help with hangovers – but it hasn’t always been a friend to the thirsty.

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Getting sexy with cinnamon

| Kirsten Riley

Add some flavour to your love life with this spice. It will warm up more than just your buns.

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Cloves to mull, mask and numb

| Helen Babbs

Sweet, pungent, warm, woody: cloves smell and taste like Christmas. But there’s much more to this spice than that.

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There’s more to gingerbread than ginger

| Mary-Anne Boermans

‘Bake-Off’ finalist Mary-Anne Boermans treats us to the warm and enticing pleasures of gingerbread over centuries.

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Indian botanicals and heritage wars

| Sita Reddy

Colonial botanical texts, as astonishingly beautiful as they are, may cast very dark shadows.

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Hamlet, the melancholic Prince of Denmark

| Nelly Ekström

Hamlet clearly demonstrates an excess of black bile and is arguably the most famous literary melancholic.

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Illuminated manuscripts, illuminating medicines

| Cheryl Porter

From rare bugs to exorbitantly priced plant parts, find out more about the artistic and medical uses of pigments from the past.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

Ayurveda: Knowledge for long life

| Aarathi Prasad

The story of medicine in India is rich and complex. Aarathi Prasad investigates how it came to be this way.

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The Key to Memory: Follow your nose

Elissavet Ntoulia explores what a pair of pomanders can tell us about how and why we remember.

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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.

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The intermediate life of spirits

| Courttia Newland

Courttia Newland explores the events and his feelings surrounding the death of his mother-in-law, Tara Chauhan.

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Enduring taboos and the future of skin bleaching

| Ngunan AdamuAmaal Said

Many condemn skin bleaching in public while secretly lightening their own complexions. To break away from these taboos, we need honest information and open conversation.

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How not to play

| Holly GramazioThomas S G Farnetti

Here are seven ways to sidestep doing as you’re told in a game. But strangely, they seem to be as much a part of playing as the game itself.