Stories

We tell stories about health and human experience. Our words and pictures make connections, provoke new thinking and share lived experiences.

  • Comic

FINE!

There’s life on both sides of the desk.

Part of Sorry to keep you waiting

  • Serial
Part2

Are people born violent?

Laura Bui explores how the nature vs nurture debate applies to those who commit homicide.

Part of The Hidden Side of Violence

  • Book extract

Naked, not nude

Classicist Caroline Vout argues that it’s time to take the dust covers off the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and to encounter their bodies not nude, but naked.

Part of Inside Our Books

  • Comic

Changing advice

“The foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wise man knowes himselfe to be a foole.”

Part of Sorry to keep you waiting

  • Serial
Part1

What is violence?

Criminologist Laura Bui explores her early understanding of violence and outlines its definition and wider consequences.

Part of The Hidden Side of Violence

Hoard

Georgie Evans’s weekly visits to her grandma’s means she knows what never throwing anything away looks like. In this series, she attempts to understand why Grandma needed to surround herself with so much stuff, and why hoarding behaviour can be difficult to define and discuss.

Books

Get stuck into one of our books, and explore the complexities of the human condition.

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  • Article

What is air, and how do we know?

Watching bubbles in fermenting beer led 18th-century scientist Joseph Priestley to invent sparkling water – and to discover that different gases make up the air we breathe.

  • In pictures

Laughing gas and the scientific pursuit of the sublime

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.

Part of Inside Our Collections

  • In pictures

Anxiety in the air

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.

Part of Inside Our Collections

  • Article

Eugenics and the welfare state

Indy Bhullar explores the ideas of William Beveridge and Richard Titmuss, who were strongly influenced by eugenic thinking, and yet championed the idea of the welfare state.

Part of Eugenics and other stories

  • Article

Making sunstroke insanity

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.

Part of Eugenics and other stories

  • Article

The secret lives of Britain’s first Black physicians

Dr Annabel Sowemimo explores the web of connections between early Black British doctors, the role of empire in West Africa and the pernicious reach of scientific racism.

Part of Eugenics and other stories

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