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Stories

  • Article

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.

  • 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.

  • Interview

Inside the mind of George Vasey, co-curator of Misbehaving Bodies

Discover how curator George Vasey honoured the approaches of Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery, who mischievously subvert clichés around illness and death.

  • Article

The making of ‘Quacks’

How do you create a medical comedy that’s authentic and laugh-out-loud funny?

All stories (36)

Images

  • Ehemera from the Centre for Sexual and Reproductive Health collection held in the Library & Archives Serviice at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
  • Plan of Wellcome museum galleries: 3rd floor showing new arrangement, 1942, Dr Daukes scheme: cosmogony, evolution, prehistory, primitive medicine, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, library etc...
  • Compilation of posters from the Centre for Sexual and Reproductive Health collection in the Library & Archives at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine : originally designed as a posterboard for the exhibition HIV/AIDS: controlling and eradicating a modern epidemic, 2014.
  • Compilation of posters from the Centre for Sexual and Reproductive Health collection in the Library & Archives at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine : originally designed as a posterboard for the exhibition HIV/AIDS: controlling and eradicating a modern epidemic, 2014.
  • School of Medicine, Paris: a mural in the amphitheatre showing fifty-six prominent medical men in a neo-classical setting. Lithograph by N. Legrand, 1908, after U. Bourgeois, 1895.
  • Fuchsia magellanica Lam. Onagraceae. Hardy fuchsia. Semi-hardy shrub. Distribution: Mountainous regions of Chile and Argentina where they are called 'Chilco' by the indigenous people, the Mapuche. The genus was discovered by Charles Plumier in Hispaniola in 1696/7, and named by him for Leonhart Fuchs (1501-1566), German Professor of Medicine, whose illustrated herbal, De Historia Stirpium (1542) attempted the identification of the plants in the Classical herbals. It also contained the first accounts of maize, Zea mays, and chilli peppers, Capsicum annuum, then recently introduced from Latin America. He was also the first person to publish an account and woodcuts of foxgloves, Digitalis purpurea and D. lutea. The book contains 500 descriptions and woodcuts of medicinal plants, arranged in alphabetical order, and relied heavily on the De Materia Medica (c. AD 70) of Dioscorides. He was a powerful influence on the herbals of Dodoens, and thence to Gerard, L’Escluse and Henry Lyte. A small quarto edition appeared in 1551, and a two volume facsimile of the 1542 edition with commentary and selected translations from the Latin was published by Stanford Press in 1999. The original woodcuts were passed from printer to printer and continued in use for 232 years (Schinz, 1774). Photographed in the Medicinal Garden of the Royal College of Physicians, London.
  • Agrimonia eupatoria L. Agrimony, Eupatorium, Maudlein. Perennial herb. The species name comes from king Mithridates Eupator VI of Pontus (132-63 BC) who took regular doses of poison to develop an immunity to them. A 'Mithridate' was a medicine against poisons. Distribution: N. and S. Africa, N. Asia, Europe. '…provokes urine and the terms [periods], dries the brain, opens stoppings, helps the green sickness [iron deficiency anaemia], and profits such as have a cold weak liver outwardly applied it takes away the hardness of the matrix [=uterus] and fills hollow ulcers with flesh' (Culpeper, 1650). Dioscorides (Beck, 2005) recommends mashed leaves in hog's grease for healing scarring ulcers, and the seed in wine for dysentery and serpent bites. Goodyear's 1655 translation of Dioscorides (Gunther 2000) has this as cannabis, which Parkinson (1640) says is in error and summarises the manifold uses from classical authors, from removing splinters to stopping menorrhagia. Photographed in the Medicinal Garden of the Royal College of Physicians, London.
  • Anatomical Fugitive Sheets: detail of Autumn, c. 1620
  • Anatomical Fugitive Sheets: Spring; circa 1620
  • Anatomical Fugitive Sheets: summer, c. 1620
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Catalogue

All works (110)