The tenth annual report of the Chinese Hospital, at Shanghae, from January 1st, to December 31st, 1856 / by the Committee.

Opera quae extant omnia / Adriani Spigelii. Ex recensione Joh, Antonidae vander Linden. Public Domain Mark. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Commissioned officers in the medical services of the British Army, 1660-1960 / [A. Peterkin, William Johnston, R. Drew].

A 17th-century physician’s controversial theory about the link between the emotions and the stomach reminds us that we shouldn’t ignore our ‘gut feelings’.

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.

Posters by artists who turned their art into activism to support their communities and raise awareness of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s.

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 ...

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 ...

A 19th-century campaigner who condemned the practice of keeping a dead person at home before the funeral started a gradual trend for outsourcing the preparation and storage of a body. But as a ...

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.

Laura Grace Simpkins attempts to untangle some uncomfortable truths about the social and environmental costs of making her medication.

Ours is the age of contagious anxiety. We feel overwhelmed by the events around us, by injustice, by suffering, by an endless feeling of crisis. So how can we nurture the parts of ourselves that hope, ...