Science & Medicine Week

A reconstruction of a Theban painting from the Ancient Egyptian Dynasty XIX depicting a childbirth scene. The mother is seen being helped by her handmaidens and a midwife. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

7 surprising facts about the history of medicine

London & North Western Railway locomotive, 1848. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

8 ways railway travel changed everything for Britain

A portrait of Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale: nursing by numbers

From The Library

Peter Mayhew, Harrison Ford, Alec Guinness and Mark Hamill, on-set of the film Star Wars

Star Wars: why did the film make history?

Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. (Photo by Getty Images)

Yuri Gagarin: 8 things you (probably) didn’t know about the first man in space

Coca cola bottles from the 1990s

From Velcro to Viagra: 10 products that were invented by accident

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Brunel: a hard taskmaster

Appia Antica (The Appian Way), Rome, Lazio, Italy, Europe. (Getty)

Invention or adaptation: what did the Romans really do for us?

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In pictures: a history of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

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First World War

America’s ‘Mrs Holmes’: how one woman took on the cases the NYPD couldn’t solve

The operation

John Hunter and the horrors of 18th-century surgery

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Ada Lovelace: a visionary of computing

Sarcophagus with relief depicting the Calydonian boar hunt, Campanian amphitheatre, Italy, 1st-2nd century AD. (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

General prehistory

From dragons to unicorns: finding fantastic beasts in ancient history

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Phantasmagoria: creating the ‘ghosts’ of the Enlightenment