Medicine & Disease

Over the course of the 19th century snake oil transformed from folk remedy, to industrial medicine, to notorious fake.

Early modern cancer experiments such as that undertaken by English surgeon Samuel Smith privileged the senses, but the effects could be fatal.

The men and medics of the 17th century were consumed with anxiety over women’s pregnancy cravings.

Life at sea was hard. An early modern ship’s surgeon had to treat not just broken bones but distress and trauma. 

Surgeons trying to eliminate pain eventually arrived at anaesthesia – but not before a contest with older, more unusual therapies. Why was mesmerism so magnetic?

For much of the 20th century, young working-class women in England received their sex education the ‘hard way’ or the ‘dirty way’.

The First World War revealed the bad state of Britain’s teeth. Intervention was required to keep the nation biting fit.

Sarah Wise’s The Undesirables: The Law that Locked Away a Generation lays bare the cruelty and injustice of the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913.

When it was first named in 17th-century Switzerland, nostalgia was a very real – and very dangerous – disease.