Medicine & Disease

Paul Brassley puts MAFF's policy towards Foot and Mouth Disease into historical perspective.

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.

Elaine Murphy looks at the two families who dominated the private provision of care for the insane in London in the early 19th century.

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?

Alex Werner previews a new exhibition on skeletons at the Museum of London.

Ian Scott traces the hundred-year history of heroin, from cough medicine to underworld narcotic. 

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.

Peter Atkins and Paul Brassley uncover alarming 19th-century precedents for the ‘mad cow’ fiasco.