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  • Article

Disturbed minds and disruptive bodies

Prison officers tried to regulate women’s minds and bodies and maintain a new disciplinary routine in the second half of the 1800s.

  • Article

The father of handwashing

Doctors performing autopsies and then delivering babies – with not a hint of soap in between – was the grim recipe producing a lot of motherless offspring in the 1800s. But one man’s gargantuan efforts to upend accepted medical thinking turned the tide.

  • Article

The birth of the public museum

The first public museums evolved from wealthy collectors’ cabinets of curiosities and were quickly recognised as useful vehicles for culture.

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  • Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum: floor plan with scale and key. Line engraving by R. Scott after R. Reid.
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