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

Symptoms of hypoglycaemia in Kenya. Colour lithograph by Ministry of Health, ca. 2000. Date: [2000?] Reference: 755521i ...

In the five centuries since Europeans were introduced to tobacco, smoking has generated considerable controversy. This gallery tracks shifting views on smoking and health, from life-saving stimulant ...

As Covid-19 first swept the UK in March 2020, seven Nightingale field hospitals were rapidly constructed across the country. The design ideas behind these conversions of existing buildings can be ...

How do you avoid catching the plague? Smoke constantly. Carry a sponge soaked in vinegar. Hang oranges studded with cloves around your house. This was the best medical advice available circa 1665, as ...

show credit information for image 'Geothermal hot spring landscape in Railroad Valley, Nevada, where a Canadian mining company is drilling a new hole in an effort to find large deposits of lithium.

We think of assistive technology as something modern, and that people with mobility issues in the past were limited to their locality or confined within their homes. But there are clues in the ...

At the age of 22 I found myself in an airless, dreary and packed family court in India. My violent and abusive marriage was coming to an end. My husband couldn’t stand the fact that I was an ...

show credit information for image 'Phallic object, large plaster female figure.' Alfred Charles Kinsey once said that a nymphomaniac is “someone who has more sex than you do”, and Kinsey was a man who ...

In 1950, an American journalist popularised the term ‘brainwashing’, arguing that a new amalgam of technology, medicine and ideology was allowing an onslaught on people’s minds. In this abridged ...

The cloud collar (云肩) has over 2,500 years of history in China. Yiling Zhang traces how having your head in the clouds went from cosmological symbol to fashion essential.

My whole life had been marked by pain that I never had a name for. My family and I always thought that I just had a bit of a ‘weird body’. I experienced dislocations, subluxations, slipped disks, and ...