Stories
- Article
Drugs in Victorian Britain
Many common remedies were taken throughout the 19th century, with more people than ever using them. What was the social and cultural context of this development?
- Article
Cocaine, the Victorian wonder drug
Today, cocaine has a very poor public image as one of the causes of crime and violence. But for the Victorians it was welcomed as the saviour of modern surgery.
- Article
Why we no longer keep our dead at home
Today in the UK we rarely sit with, touch, or perhaps even see our loved ones after they’ve died. Past practices were very different and, Claire Cock-Starkey argues, were more helpful for those grieving.
- Article
Reversing the psychiatric gaze
Nineteenth-century psychiatrists were keen to categorise their patients’ illnesses reductively – by their physical appearance. But we can see a far more complex picture of mental distress, revealed by those patients able to express their inner worlds in art.
Catalogue
- Pictures
The Fallaize Collection.
Date: [late 19th and early 20th century]Reference: 3303244i- Pictures
- Online
A group of vaccinators leading a small-pocked woman form a procession past a university, with Death waving his scythe behind them; the members of the university doze in the foreground; attributing the decline of Germany in 19th century to vaccination and syphilis. Lithograph after C.G.G. Nittinger, 1856.
Nittinger, Carl Georg Gottlob.Date: 1856Reference: 17876i- Archives and manuscripts
SAINT LUKE'S HOSPITAL {WOODSIDE HOSPITAL}
Date: 1750 - 2001Reference: H64- Pictures
- Online
An unwell woman bombarded by her five friends' different recommendations of a doctor. Wood engraving by G. Du Maurier, 1882.
Du Maurier, George, 1834-1896.Date: 1882Reference: 14281i- Books
Normality : a critical genealogy / Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens.
Cryle, P. M. (Peter Maxwell), 1946-Date: 2017