Wellcome uses cookies.

Read our policy
Wellcome Collection homepage
All
Stories
Images
Catalogue
Events

Stories

  • Article

Why “crazy cat ladies” are healthier than you may think

Writer Erica Crompton ponders the reasons behind the misogynist “crazy cat lady” trope, and reclaims cat ownership as a positive way to help restore mental equilibrium.

  • Book extract

The meaning of happiness

What is happiness? Tiffany Watt Smith charts how its definition has changed over time, from chance emotion to something that can be measured and controlled.

  • Long read

The ambivalence of air

Daisy Lafarge investigates the effects of air quality and pressure on body and mind, exploring air as cure, but one with contradictions.

All stories (3)

Images

  • The principle of barometric measurement, and examples of barometers. Coloured engraving by J. Pass, 1798.
  • An advertisement for a maker of glass instruments: showing thermometers, hour-glasses, and barometers. Engraving.
  • A domestic weather-station: combined thermometer, hygrometer, and barometer. Engraving after B. Martin.
  • A doctor inserts a barometer, instead of a thermometer, in a patient's backside: his condition reads "Set fair". Colour process print after J-A. Faivre, 1902.
  • A doctor asking a patient's wife if she has taken his temperature; she replies that she used the barometer to take his temperature and that, as he was very dry she gave him some beer. Wood engraving by G. King, 1911.
  • Atlas geographique et physique du royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne : fondé sur des observations astronomiques, des mesures trigonométriques et des nivellemens barométriques / par Al. de Humboldt.
  • Clocks: James Cox's "perpetual motion" self-winding clock. Engraving by J. Lodge, 1774.
  • A maid bringing medicine and soup to her master who has a cold. Lithograph, 1857, after W.H. Simmons after J. Collinson.
  • Pascal's experiment in the Puy de Dôme to test the relation between atmospheric pressure and altitude. Oil painting by Ernest Board.
  • An episode in Dombey and son by Charles Dickens: the interior of "The wooden midshipman", a shop in the City of London for navigational instruments; a boy ("Rob the Grinder") is conversing with a pugilist known as "The Game Chicken". Etching by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne).
All images (13)

Catalogue

All works (118)