The Mad-House Keepers of East London
Elaine Murphy looks at the two families who dominated the private provision of care for the insane in London in the early 19th century.
Medicine & Disease
The End of Smallpox
The smallpox vaccine was attacked by a widespread 19th-century anti-vax movement. Facing such hostility, how did smallpox become the first disease eradicated by immunisation?
Bodies at the Museum of London
Alex Werner previews a new exhibition on skeletons at the Museum of London.
50 Years of the NHS
Charles Webster reflects on the achievements and shortcomings of fifty years of the National Health Service.
Heroin: A Hundred-Year Habit
Ian Scott traces the hundred-year history of heroin, from cough medicine to underworld narcotic.
Alchemy: New Light on a Dark Art
Fools' gold, Dr Faustus - traditional images of a Renaissance black art. But was there more to it than that? Zbigniew Szydlo and Richard Brzezinski offer an intriguing rehabilitation.
The Rise and Fall of the Age of Miracles
Roy Porter charts the whirlwind of medical triumphs that promised limitless progress in human health and our more sober reflections on the eve of the third millennium.
Mad Cows and Englishmen
Peter Atkins and Paul Brassley uncover alarming 19th-century precedents for the ‘mad cow’ fiasco.
The X Factor in X-rays
New innovations in radiology have sparked public criticism as to its safety and cost-effectiveness. Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen's discovery of the X-ray in 1895 and its subsequent use in medicine sparked similar safety and health hazard concerns throughout its development.
Allinson's Staff of Life - Health Without Medicine in the 1890s
Sarah Pepper investigates a medical pioneer whose name survives today on a bread wrapper, but whose sweeping system of wholefoods and natural prescriptions offended the medical establishment of late Victorian England.