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Does having a debilitating disease help or hinder creative genius?

Curator Emily Sargent reveals why council estates and a Finnish TB sanatorium were chosen for the ‘Living with Buildings’ exhibition.

When we’re ill, it’s not just medical care that helps to treat us. Architects have discovered that the right environment can play an important part too.

Daisy Lafarge investigates the effects of air quality and pressure on body and mind, exploring air as cure, but one with contradictions.

Fashionable seaside towns in England owe much of their popularity to 18th-century doctors, who advised them to take the 'sea cure'.

Epidemiology is the systematic, data-driven study of health and disease in populations. But as historian Jacob Steere-Williams suggests, this most scientific of fields emerged in the 19th century imbued with a doctrine of Western imperialism – a legacy that continues to influence how we talk about disease.

Come on the trail of hundreds of ghost hospitals, whose remnants hold clues to medical treatments of the past.

From scarred outsiders in literature to the cold voyeurism of medical films and photography, people who experience seizures and epilepsy are rarely shown in a compassionate light in popular culture.

Formal deaf education in England started at the end of the 18th century with an innovative school in London.

Focusing on three 19th-century women’s case notes, Millie van der Byl Williams explores how our definition of dementia has changed.

In the late 19th century a ‘garden suburb’ promised a retreat from London’s dirt and crowds. See how this new concept was developed to appeal to the health concerns of the literary classes.

India, 1857. In a British enclave, Katherine Bartrum watches her friend, and then her family, succumb to the deadly cholera.

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.

Before the invention of X-ray in 1895 there was really only one way to accurately study the human body, and that was to cut it open.

Guy Stagg takes us on a brief history of rehab centres and their approaches to addiction and recovery.

This display features a rare medieval birth scroll and explores protective practices and beliefs around pregnancy, childbirth and infertility past and present.

Medical historian Dr Kristin Hussey takes a closer look at sunstroke and mental illness, and how, in the late 19th century, they connected at the crossroads of colonial science and the idea of whiteness.

Communicating with hand signs has a long history. Researcher Jude Seal examines the evidence for signing in Medieval Europe among both deaf and hearing communities.

Darling of 19th-century American freak shows, Evatima Tardo remained serene as she withstood crucifixion and the bites of poisonous snakes. But she took the secret behind her abilities to her grave.

How a young Indian monk’s travels around the world inspired modern yoga.