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  • Article

The unearthly children of science fiction’s Cold War

In the 1950s a new figure emerged in British novels, film and television: a disturbing young alien that revealed postwar society’s fear of the unruly power of teenagers.

  • Article

Would you like to buy a dinosaur?

Two remarkable letters and a drawing of a plesiosaur by Mary Anning offer a tantalising portal into the exciting world of fossil hunting and discovery 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.

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Images

  • The Royal Hospital at Chelsea; Stephen Fox, the architect, in a boat on the Thames in the foreground. Engraving by J. Kip, ca. 1707.
  • Makers of British botany : a collection of biographies by living botanists / edited by F.W. Oliver.
  • Three bookmakers (representing British politicians) are watching a horserace in which three horses are neck and neck. Colour lithograph by Tom Merry, 7 September 1889.
  • Oversize ephemera : Medical songs 2.
  • Oversize ephemera : Medical songs 2.
  • Oversize ephemera : Medical songs 2.
  • Oversize ephemera : Medical songs 2.
  • Oversize ephemera : Medical songs 2.
  • Oversize ephemera : Medical songs 2.
  • Oversize ephemera : Medical songs 2.
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