Heroin: A Hundred-Year Habit
Ian Scott traces the hundred-year history of heroin, from cough medicine to underworld narcotic.
Medicine & Disease
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.
Canada's Chinese Connection
Penelope Johnston describes China's revered North American hero
Quacks and Cash
The British Medical Journal is 150 years old this autumn and has witnessed in its time a kaleidoscope of changing attitudes towards medicines, their ethics and efficiency. Peter Bartrip looks at its campaign against patent medicines at the turn of the century and the ambiguities of attitudes in the medical profession it reveals.
Bloodstained Mementos of Medieval Medicine
Peter Bowron looks into excavations found at a Middle Ages hospital in Scotland.