Wellcome uses cookies.

Read our policy
Wellcome Collection homepage
All
Stories
Images
Catalogue
Events

Stories

  • Article

Thousands of years of women’s pain

Even in the 21st century, women with severe monthly pain find their suffering minimised or dismissed by the medical profession. Such pain is seen as simply a natural part of being female.

  • Book extract

Renaissance women and their killer cosmetics

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.

  • Article

Hysteria

Mental health and emotional symptoms are common during menopause, but a long history of dismissing sufferers as 'hysterical women', at the mercy of their emotions has made it much harder to discuss these issues and to get support.

  • Article

Invisibility

Why do menopausal women feel invisible? Because nobody talks about menopause or because society doesn't value older women?

All stories (36)

Images

  • A dandified physician takes the lancet to a turkey, watched over by fashionable women. Coloured etching, 1801.
  • A dandified physician takes the lancet to a turkey, watched over by fashionable women. Coloured etching, 1801.
  • Four types of physician using their qualifications to take advantage of their women patients or of the public. Coloured lithographs, ca. 1852.
  • Four types of physician using their qualifications to take advantage of their women patients or of the public. Coloured lithographs, ca. 1852.
  • Polygonum bistorta L. Polygonaceae Bistort, snakeweed, Easter Ledges. Distribution: Europe, N & W Asia. Culpeper: “... taken inwardly resist pestilence and poison, helps ruptures, and bruises, stays fluxes, vomiting and immoderate flowing of the terms in women, helps inflammations and soreness of the mouth, and fastens loose teeth, being bruised and boiled in white wine and the mouth washed with it.” In modern herbal medicine it is still used for a similar wide variety of internal conditions, but it can also be cooked and eaten as a vegetable. The use to relieve toothache, applied as a paste to the affected tooth, seems to have been widespread. Photographed in the Medicinal Garden of the Royal College of Physicians, London.
  • A physician sitting before a table, holding a urine flask, with two women, a boy and several other figures in the room. Oil painting by Gerard Thomas.
  • A physician sitting before a table, holding a urine flask, with two women, a boy and several other figures in the room. Oil painting by Gerard Thomas.
  • A physician sitting before a table, holding a urine flask, with two women, a boy and several other figures in the room. Oil painting by Gerard Thomas.
  • A physician sitting before a table, holding a urine flask, with two women, a boy and several other figures in the room. Oil painting by Gerard Thomas.
  • A physician sitting before a table, holding a urine flask, with two women, a boy and several other figures in the room. Oil painting by Gerard Thomas.
All images (167)

Catalogue

All works (1.2K)