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Stories

  • Article

The secret hystery of a womb

A Renaissance image of a caesarean section inspired Anna Blundy to recount the story of a hidden, perhaps mysterious part of her body.

  • Book extract

Ayurveda: Knowledge for long life

The story of medicine in India is rich and complex. Aarathi Prasad investigates how it came to be this way.

  • Article

Fantastic beasts and unnatural history

Find out how a 17th-century compendium of the natural world came to present fantastical beasts –like dragons – as real, living creatures.

  • Article

Why the world needs collectors

Those who collect play an important role as “facilitators of curiosity”, says Anna Faherty.

All stories (6)

Images

  • Microscope drawings of plant anatomy with cells and growing points. Lithograph after C. Varley, c.1834.
  • Anatomy and botany: top, skull, jawbone, and muscles of head; bottom, hellebore plant. Coloured engraving, 1834-1837.
  • Microscope drawings of plant anatomy with cells and tissues of stonewort (Chara and Nitella species). Lithograph after C. Varley, c.1834.
  • Anatomy and botany; top left, dissected head and chest showing arteries; top right, larynx; bottom left, buckthorn plant; centre, surgical instruments; bottom right, electric ray fish. Coloured engraving, 1834-1837.
  • Anatomy and botany; top left, dissected head and chest; top right, dissected thorax; centre left, forceps; centre right, man with tumours on his head; bottom left, belladona plant. Coloured engraving, 1834-1837.
  • Knautia macedonica Griseb. Dipsacaceae. Distribution: Macedonia. This honours the brothers Knaut, both physicians and botanists: Christof Knaut (also Knauth, 1638–94) and his brother Christian Knaut (1654–1716). The plant was traditionally used as a compress in its native Balkans to relieve dermatitis and itching. This use is a local survival of what was once a widespread application of this plant and its relations, and is an example of the doctrine of signatures in which the therapeutic benefit of a plant is suggested by some aspect of its anatomy
  • N. Grew, the anatomy of plants / With an ide
  • The anatomy of plants / With an idea of a philosophical history of plants. And several other lectures. Read before the Royal Society.
  • The anatomy of plants / With an idea of a philosophical history of plants. And several other lectures. Read before the Royal Society.
  • The anatomy of plants / With an idea of a philosophical history of plants. And several other lectures. Read before the Royal Society.
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