Our ideas of what constitutes paying respects to the dead, as with all other aspects of death culture, continually change, influenced by all kinds of things ranging from technological advances to a ...

Early modern hospitals in Europe predominantly served people from poorer communities, as wealthy people could afford to be nursed at home. Manuscript and woodcut illustrations from the 16th century ...

In the mid-19th century, behavioural neurologists made important discoveries just by looking at the surface of the brain. Paul Broca, the best known of them, treated two stroke patients who had lost ...

The translation of the caption on this poster from the Swiss AIDS Foundation is “Excluded because of AIDS? Excluded!”. By the 1990s it was becoming clear that everyone was vulnerable to the HIV virus, ...

W hen terrible winter storms lashed the East Coast of America in December 2022, many people were cut off from medical help. As a result, a local nurse in Buffalo issued a set of instructions on social ...

The early Christian Church was built on the bodies of martyrs. Sometimes this was by literally constructing places of worship on the site of a martyrdom, but in addition, tales of the deaths of those ...

The British Migraine Association ran a series of migraine art competitions in the 1980s with the intention to share people’s varied experiences of migraine. In the seven years that the competition ran ...

At the heart of this approach was the belief that foul air caused tuberculosis. Despite Robert Koch’s discovery of the TB germ, Mycobacterium tuberculosis in 1882, the foul-air theory continued to ...

The Medicine Man gallery has been part of Wellcome Collection since we opened in 2007. It was one of five spaces where visitors can see items from the collections for free, alongside the Reading Room, ...

These Photographs were kept as part of Frank Hawking's research into paracites and disease. He packaged the photographs in envelopes which were then stored in a box file. Most of the photos have been ...

Beddoes publicly announced the discovery of an entirely “new pleasure” in nitrous oxide gas at the Pneumatic Institute. Beddoes, who had married Anna, the sister of novelist Maria Edgeworth in 1794, ...

Miasma theory proposed that “bad air”, emitted by rubbish heaps or collections of human waste in towns, could travel, spreading disease and causing sickness. The air itself was to blame for poor ...