Roy Porter

The Body Politic: Diseases and Discourses

Roy Porter opens our new series on Picturing History, based on a series of lectures organised in conjunction with Reaktion Books, and shows how 18th-century images of the medical profession flow over into the work of political caricaturists.

Matrix of Modernity

Roy Porter discusses how the British Enlightenment paved the way for the modern world.

Reading is Bad for your Health

Roy Porter, in his Longman/History Today lecture, warns of the bad eyesight, poor posture, incomprehensible babblings, addled wits, depravity and worse that may befall those who immerse themselves too much in books.

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.

Healthy History

Roy Porter argues that historians must re-examine their purpose, between specialised study and general discovery.

The Foundling Hospital

Roy Porter describes an institution of the mid-18th century designed to care for abandoned infants.

Margery Kempe and the Meaning of Madness

'Living high above her bodily wits' - but was the 'madness' of a 15th-century English gentlewoman divine folly, marital stress or the stirrings of a self-conscious feminist?