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Can isolation lead to manipulation?
Military-funded researchers wanted to know if isolation techniques could facilitate brainwashing. One neuroscientist suggested that it might improve our own control over our minds.
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How do advertisers get inside our heads?
Vance Packard exposed techniques of mass manipulation developed by 1950s advertisers that are still at work today in the age of big data.
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Can our minds be taken hostage?
It’s not unusual for captives to end up feeling strong bonds with their captors. But is it a matter of submission or survival?
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Can our sexual desires be transformed?
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.
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Do good mothers make good democracy?
To be psychologically fit for democracy, one distinguished paediatrician argued that you need a ‘good enough mother’ – and that we must acknowledge the bad side of our feelings.
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How electromagnetic therapy inspired me
Poet Sarah James explores how repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation treated her depression and influenced her art.
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The epilepsy diagnosis
Epilepsy exists between the mind and body, something that Aparna Nair experienced for herself when she was diagnosed as a teenager.
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Female masturbation and the perils of pleasure
Dr Kate Lister exposes the brutal 19th-century ‘cures’ for women who indulged in masturbation.
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Cocaine, the Victorian wonder drug
Today, cocaine has a very poor public image as one of the causes of crime and violence. But for the Victorians it was welcomed as the saviour of modern surgery.
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Illuminated manuscripts, illuminating medicines
From rare bugs to exorbitantly priced plant parts, find out more about the artistic and medical uses of pigments from the past.
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Pain and the power of touch
As a new physiotherapist, Fiona Murphy quickly learned that her patients’ pain was unpredictable and very personal. But using the right words became the key to helping them.