Inside Our Collections

Part science lecture. part public spectacle, thanks to chemist Humphry Davy the 19th-century craze for inhaling nitrous oxide rapidly spread from the science laboratory to fashionable salons and homes of the day, and onto the popular stage.

Our centuries-old fear of disease-carrying “bad air” might have been modified by scientific advances, but it’s still liable to re-emerge under the right circumstances, as Kirsten Nicholson explains.

Industrialisation brought visibly polluted air to the world’s cities, captured in various media from the 1800s. Angela Saward explores the methods used, and the messages the images conveyed.

Wellcome’s Adrian Plau shares some the stories behind the Asian palm-leaf manuscripts in our collections. He reveals how British colonialism impacted this special form of knowledge transmission and the challenges involved in unearthing each manuscript’s origins and historical journey to Wellcome Collection.

Having experienced the healing power of plants and gardens, Iona Glen goes in search of present-day “physic gardens” and their origins in history.

Find out how hydrogen peroxide has been used to do everything from investigate murders and propel rockets to treat teeth and bleach hair.

Find out how activists and organisations working on AIDS information campaigns in 1980s Scotland used cartoons, kilts, and candid language to convey their message.

Discover how chocolate morphed from a prized, spiritually significant commodity to a quasi-medicine, and finally to the sweet treat we eat almost daily.

The healing powers of different breathing methods are said to help with a range of health challenges, from asthma to PTSD. Effie Webb traces their spiritual origins and explores the modern proliferation of breathwork therapies.

Ever since the discovery of cinchona bark as a treatment for malaria in 17th-century South America, the cinchona tree has accompanied European colonisation around the world. Kim Walker tracks the human and ecological impact of this global commodity.

Ross MacFarlane traces the ideas around Charles Darwin’s famous ‘Tree of Life’, both back to the Bible, and forward to its appropriation by the proponents of eugenics.

The death of a close friend made David Jesudason want to know more about viruses and the people who first discover them. Here, he puts both under the microscope.

Cigarettes gifted ex-smoker David Jesudason coughing, wheezing and fatigue, yet they also gave him pleasure. Here he unpicks his fluctuating attitudes towards lighting up.

For a couple of centuries, friendly societies plugged the healthcare gap between expensive private care and charitable institutions for many thousands of people in the UK.

There’s a lot of plant lore about the mandrake, going back to ancient times. Find out more about how this unremarkable-looking plant got its magical reputation.

Votive offerings, known as ex-votos, have been a vibrant part of devotional practice since ancient times and, Louisa McKenzie suggests, they still have a place in the secular world of today.

Hookah smoking began in the royal courts of Mughal India, and like many other local customs, it was readily adopted by British colonials in the 18th century as a symbol of wealth and status.

For thousands of years, and in many different cultures, people have practised bloodletting for health and medical reasons. Julia Nurse explains where and when bleeding was used, how it was done, and why.

If you fancy a slice of cake with your tea this afternoon, read on to find out how your luck, health or marriage prospects might change as you munch.

Medicine as ‘theatre’ began in the 16th century, when paying audiences enjoyed candlelight, live music – and a cadaver being dissected in front of them, all the in name of education.

Held responsible for their own “rebellious distempers” – or menopausal symptoms – women had no choice but to keep quiet and resort to unpalatable concoctions in the hope of relief, as Julia Nurse explains.

Amanda Couch's artists book, 'Huwawa in the Everyday: an almanac' is inspired by the entrail like folds of a medieval folding and its function as a guide for astrological divinations linking the body, health and the heavens. Like the original almanac her work is designed to be carried out into the wider world.

David Jesudason’s relationship with alcohol is complicated. Here he explores how booze can shape our behaviour, describing how he’s matured from underage drinker to cask-ale connoisseur.

Discover the accessory that has captivated people for centuries, from seventh-century buddhas to 21st-century fashion subcultures.

It’s been over 400 years since a Swiss alchemist theorised that foetuses could develop outside the womb. Claire Horn examines incubator technology past and present, and explores the possibilities recent prototypes might bring.

When we bring someone in hospital a bunch of grapes, we don't expect the grapes to work a miraculous cure upon them. But throughout history, wondrous healing powers have been attributed to the humble grape.

An enduring enthusiasm for 18th-century gentlemen to defend their ‘honour’ by duelling placed doctors in a delicate position. Specially when they faced being shot themselves.

There are clues in the margins of medieval manuscripts to suggest that disabled people in the past made long pilgrimages, and were helped on their journeys by mobility aids remarkably similar to those we have today.

Cancer has a reputation as a modern disease, but these historical images show that it’s been part of our lives for centuries.

As millions across the world enjoy this year’s Paralympics, discover how the Paralympian movement started life – with an event held by the visionary neurosurgeon Ludwig Guttmann.

Could upper-class hair-hygiene regimes cause baldness, or does hair health depend on a blast of deadly mercury? Maisie Jenkins scours the archives for historic follicle care.

Pioneering epidemiologist Dr Alice Stewart realised how things in our daily lives could be as deadly as any infectious disease.

These days we might not think that celibacy could kill you, but otherwise, medieval tips to maintain wellness still often ring true.

In a 1940s cartoon intended to persuade US troops to take malaria medication, the makers pitted a clodhopping soldier against a wily mosquito. If only Private SNAFU had followed the government’s advice.

There are around 15 iron corsets in museum collections around the world, including two in Wellcome Collection. Historians still dispute their purpose, but these intriguing objects hold clues about who would have worn them and why.

Discover how the design of Britain’s Nightingale hospitals, set up during the first national lockdown, is based closely on Florence Nightingale’s pioneering ideas for the most effective hospital layout.

Don’t judge a book only by its cover. Take a look inside, where decorative bookplates reveal stories that cross continents and centuries.

A 1980s film about childbirth explores how the experience felt for the women featured and offers a glimpse into the big birthing trends of the day.

From the miniature adult in the womb imagined by 15th-century artists to the increasing detail of today’s ultrasound scans, Tania McIntosh traces our changing view of the human foetus.

From douches to diaphragms, and condoms to caps, discover the wide range of contraception methods people have used over the centuries.

Find out what kinds of treatment history offered to people suffering from voice problems.

Getting creatively romantic due to a virus sounds all too contemporary, but our archives show what socially distanced seduction looked like seven decades ago.

As meat trading in the area ends, Tom Bolton looks at the history of London’s Smithfield, which has been a place of healing and death, markets and mess for 900 years.

Find out how arsenic has been used for good and ill, to cure and kill, for centuries.

Read the fascinating story behind the rare manual that helped volunteers on one of Britain’s first free telephone helplines to deal with masturbating callers.

From ancient sources of spiritual sustenance to the modern spa, Ross MacFarlane traces a brief history of healing waters.

What use is ‘twitching’? Exploring materials created over 500 years shows that there’s more to birdwatching than meets the eye.

During the current pandemic, billions of people around the world are confined to home, making mood-boosting daily exercise indispensable. Discover how humans from the ancient Greeks onwards have realised the benefits of physical activity.

For centuries, women have been ridiculed and punished for excessive talking, despite the fact that men gossip just as much.

Through its long history, London has survived some enormous epidemics. During the 1665 Great Plague of London, the city burned, shops closed, the streets emptied and bodies piled up. Read Samuel Pepys’s account of how the city pulled through.

In 1583, eye specialist Georg Bartisch published a book detailing the treatments he’d developed for various eye disorders. Today his approach seems to mix surprising innovation with entirely contemporary religious judgement.

Sometimes we literally get sick of our jobs. Discover how researchers and medics throughout history have made connections between our work and our wellbeing.

Extreme fasting has captured the public imagination for centuries. What pushes people to claim to go without food for improbable lengths of time?

Are you ill or are you simply in love? It can be hard to tell. No wonder lovesickness was for centuries regarded as a bona fide disease.

Find out how a sweet-smelling liquid anaesthetic captured the public’s imagination and changed pop culture for ever.

Isolated housewives, lonely female office workers: while the 1950s saw the birth of a general concern about them, manufacturers also spotted an opportunity. Find out how advertising promised that products could salve solitude.

Today many of us learn about fertility, conception and pregnancy online. But that wasn’t always the way. Discover how masks and rituals played an important educational role.

For years, quarantine has been an important measure to curb the spread of infection and avert further deaths. Discover the way it has been used in the past and why it is still necessary today.

Imagine a device that can treat everything from baldness to gout. Too good to be true? Yes, and it was banned – but not before hundreds were hoodwinked.

The efficacy of antibiotics and the demands of work mean we rarely convalesce after an illness. But in the past it was an important part of the return to health.

Our understanding of the importance of play in a child’s development has become increasingly sophisticated over the centuries. Explore the ways different eras have regarded childhood games.

The need to deal with battlefield injuries has led to inventive designs for extreme situations. Find out how camel-drawn ambulances and flat-pack hospitals have helped casualties survive.

Air ballooning is not as serene as you might think. Read about the perilous exploits of two early aeronauts who risked life and limb to better understand the science of the weather.

Artists and medics through the ages have made links between our discerning human senses and similar traits in animals. Discover how close we are to the earth’s other inhabitants.

How did drag develop from light-hearted female impersonation to a world-dominating art form?

Meet some of the lesser-known but no less extraordinary figures in the history of medicine, through a series of original portraits.

What is the ideal pillow? In Chinese culture, the ideal shifted over time, and views on a good sleep also reveal attitudes about studying, love, food and drink.

The great generator of confusion, rumours have not spared human health from their chaos. Find out how whispers, gossip and rumours have caused medical mishaps through the ages.

Not in the mood? Come and visit our traditional drug store for natural tonics rumoured to increase sexual desire.

With few sources of effective help available when treating an injured patient, the medieval physician could instead stage a healing ceremony using a practical how-to guide he carried with him.

From gymnastics to splints and uterine massage, the history of physiotherapy takes in a surprisingly broad range of people and practices.

How the symptom of a terrifying sickness became a lively folk dance in southern Italy.

Is childbirth an athletic feat? Kathleen Vaughan certainly thought so, developing the first modern exercise class for women in pregnancy.

Some games carry a weighty message, from the earliest form of snakes and ladders that led to either heaven or hell, to chess pieces representing the dangerous manoeuvres of unsafe sex in the 80s.

How our understanding of electricity has grown, from novelty to the pulse of modern life – and the inner fire that powers the human machine.

Explore how ideas about masculinity have influenced the way men talk about and experience their mental health, from the 1800s to today.

Twentieth-century studies reveal a whole host of anxieties about the terrors of soft toilet paper.

Early-20th-century folklorist Edward Lovett made it his mission to discover the nation’s beliefs and superstitions, collecting amulets from cottage cupboards up and down the country.

Fish, lute players and defaced demons: marginal doodles in some of Europe’s first printed books provide a tantalising glimpse into the late-medieval mind.

Scratchy throat? Burning fever? Broken heart? It all comes down to the same issue: too much blood.

Academics on hallucinogenics, kids sniffing glue, and Scientologists recruiting drug users keen to kick the habit. Delve into Wellcome’s recently acquired DrugScope archive.

Before antibiotics, syphilis unleashed centuries of misery, countered by desperate but largely useless remedies. With the spread of syphilis on the rise, it’s worth remembering what our forebears suffered.

Sickness from nervous exhaustion is not a new thing. Over a hundred years ago, neurasthenia afflicted society’s ‘brain-workers’.

From ancient sun gods to artificial light, our relationship to our star has morphed over the centuries, but the sun's power to affect our health is more noticeable than ever.

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

Many cultures associate physical cleanliness with spiritual purity, while disease and dirt are signs of moral pollution.

Today smoking is seen publicly as a deadly vice, privately perhaps as more of a guilty pleasure. Follow tobacco’s journey over the centuries from medical remedy to killer carcinogen.

Chubby little winged boys known as putti frequently adorn scientific illustrations. Sometimes portrayed as reverent and sometimes cheeky, they guide our pursuit of knowledge.

Now one of the most popular forms of exercise, the health-giving properties of swimming have not always been recognised. Dive into a gallery that charts the course from water as site of danger to a space of health.

How accurately can we imagine the future? These past prognostications suggest that we cannot escape the pull of our own time and its biases.

In the plague-ravaged London of 1665, could perfume really save your life?

Scientists, artists, and philosophers have long studied our anatomy to try to discover what it means to be human.

An uncanny resemblance to today’s Twitter tiffs characterises a 17th-century argument about demons. Read what happened when the printing presses went into overdrive.

From the elixir of life to radium, humans have always searched for a panacea: something to cure every ill. But instead it’s only highlighted our anxieties and preoccupations throughout history.

The first public museums evolved from wealthy collectors’ cabinets of curiosities and were quickly recognised as useful vehicles for culture.

The AIDS public health poster campaign chose print even in the internet age and dealt with issues of identity and behaviour like never before.

Go behind the scenes with the co-curator of the Reading Room to see how she CT scanned a mummy from our collections.

Death is many things to many cultures: violent, holy, frightening, calm, disgusting... or just a gateway to another life.

In pre-internet days, phone boxes became a patchwork of ‘tart cards’ offering sexual services. Find out about the clandestine world they hint at.