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Stories

  • Book extract

The science of why things spread

From deadly pandemics to viral tweets, Adam Kucharski explores what makes something contagious.

  • Article

The unearthly children of science fiction’s Cold War

In the 1950s a new figure emerged in British novels, film and television: a disturbing young alien that revealed postwar society’s fear of the unruly power of teenagers.

  • Article

Eugenics and the welfare state

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

The ‘undesirable epileptic’

Abused in her marriage for being 'a sick woman', Aparna Nair looked to history to make sense of the response to her epilepsy. She discovered how centuries of fear and discrimination were often endorsed by science and legislation.

All stories (61)

Images

  • Life or death in India : a paper read at the meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Norwich, 1873 / [by Florence Nightingale] ; with an appendix on life or death by irrigation, 1874.
  • Social England : a record of the progress of the people in religion, laws, learning, arts, industry, commerce, science, literature and manners, from the earliest times to the present day / edited by H.D. Traill and J.S. Mann.
  • A popular and fashionable centre devoted to the arts and sciences. Reproduction of a wood engraving after Dalziel after R. Doyle.
  • Two doctors fight over which method to use on a patient; dramatising the conflict between allopathy and homoeopathy. Coloured wood engraving.
  • The Italian social fabric symbolised by a chain of social types, with all relations of dependence ultimately relating back to the devil. Etching by G.M. Mitelli, 1691.
  • A chemist gives a demonstration involving arsenic to an audience. Coloured lithograph by H. Daumier, 1841.
  • A fiery demon representing the chaos of the Paris Commune and more generally, the infernal results of the ideals of the French Revolution. Coloured etching by G. Cruikshank, 1871.
  • Men of opposing social classes in a game of boules; illustrating the faculty of weight and resistance in phrenology. Steel engraving by A. Portier, 1847, after H. Bruyères.
  • French savants huddled together at the top of a column, while a band of Bedouin Arabs set fire to it below; exaggerating the troubled experience of the 'Commission des Sciences et des Arts' during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. Coloured etching by J. Gillray, 1799.
  • French savants huddled together at the top of a column, while a band of Bedouin Arabs set fire to it below; exaggerating the troubled experience of the 'Commission des Sciences et des Arts' during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. Coloured etching by J. Gillray, 1799.
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