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Stories

  • Photo story

My body, my hair

To depilate or not to depilate? Farah Esset and Eden Rickson share a collection of personal pictures and stories that explore the intimate interplay between body hair and identity.

  • Article

Witches

Many of the women persecuted as witches in the 16th-century “witch craze” were over 50 and exhibited signs of menopause. Helen Foster suggests that the stigma of the wicked witch still affects older women and how they deal with menopause.

  • 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

The indelible harm caused by conversion therapy

With first-hand evidence from two powerful testimonies, neurologist Jules Montague explores the destructive history of conversion therapy, a punitive treatment designed to ‘cure’ people of homosexuality.

All stories (14)

Images

  • Dermoid cyst containing long red hair, removed from a light-haired woman aged forty-four years (Montgomery)
  • A standing woman preparing to remove facial hair from seated woman using a piece of string. Watercolour, China, 18--.
  • A hairdresser raising her scissors and comb in the air after removing all but a tuft of the hair from her client who sits on a red stool; an analogy to cutting the funds of AIDS Fonds. Colour lithograph.
  • Elephant's hair. Slide by Topping - x165 - lamp. Beck Intensity and ground glass and wratten 45a filter. Condenser - Leitz 1.4 NA. Camera ext. 215 mm. Plate - Kodak Pan. Exp. 5.75m. Fine grain 1D11. Talen F.C. Griggs 29.9.48 op.lat. Top lens removed. OBJ. Watson Holes 12mm. 0.65 N.n. used 182 mm. thickcore Eyepiece x 14.
  • Cistus incanus ssp creticus Juss. Cistaceae. Rock Rose. Distribution: Crete. Interesting symbiosis with fungus called Tuber melanosporum which increases nutrient absorption for the plant and inhibits growth of other plants in the vicinity. It is a source of the resin ‘labdanum’ (a.k.a. ‘ladanum’) used in perfumes (similar smell to ambergris), as is Cistus ladanifer. It has no medical uses now, and such use was dwindling even in the 18th century. In the 16th century (Henry Lyte’s 1575 translation of Rembert Dodoen’s Cruydeboeck of 1554) its uses were described (directly copied from Dioscorides’ Materia Medica (70AD)) as: ‘Ladanum dronketh with olde wine, stoppeth the laske [periods], and provoketh urine. It is very good against the hardness of the matrix or mother [uterus] layde to in the manner of a pessarie, and it draweth down the secondes or afterbirth, when it is layde upon quicke coles [hot coals], and the fumigation or parfume thereof be received up into the body of women. // The same applied to the head with Myrrhe and oyle of Myrrhe, cureth the scurffe, called Alopecia, and keepeth the heare [hair] from falling of [sic], but whereas it is already fallen away, it will not cause the heare to growe agayne. // ...' and goes on in this vein about its uses for pain in the ears, and removing sores and scars and other things. Photographed in the Medicinal Garden of the Royal College of Physicians, London.
  • Order card.
  • Order card.
  • Bonus order card.
  • Bonus order card.
  • A Christian man being shaved while a Turk sharpens his scimitar on a whetstone behind; representing the exposure of Europe to a Turkish invader. Engraving.
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Catalogue

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