Medicine and health

After her recovery from smallpox, Queen Elizabeth I started using a ceruse foundation on her face, neck and chest. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

5 weird habits of royals through history

An illustration from 1883 shows the phrenology chart of the skull

The Victorian phrenology craze

An illumination of plague victims in Perugia, from a manuscript of the vernacular text 'La Franceschina’. (Photo By DEA/A. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images)

10 facts about the Black Death

Lady Sybil Grey, an indomitable Englishwoman who, as a nurse in Russia, led a field hospital and had a grandstand view of the February 1917 revolution that toppled the tsar. (Illustration by Sue Gent for BBC History Magazine)

First World War

The Library Lady Sybil Grey: a lady in the line of fire

Paul Morland. (Photo by Frank Monks)

Books interview with Paul Morland: “Even the Spanish flu pandemic wasn’t enough to stop population growth”

The First World War promoted advances in medicine, and in sectors such as aviation, that had not just military but also peacetime benefits, says David Stevenson. Here Captain Francis Derwent Wood treats the face of a patient, creating a mask which matches as closely as possible to the man's faces before he was injured, c1916. (Photo by Horace Nicholls/ IWM via Getty Images)

First World War

The First World War: what was it good for?

marie-curie-photograph-0963d52

First World War

Marie Curie (1867–1934): her life, achievements and legacy

The miller Samuel Wood, whose arm and scapula were torn off when entangled in a rope attached to a moving mill machinery in 1737. (Photo by Alamy)

7 bizarre cases in the history of medicine

JaCgwhH-bb9afbe

Spanish flu: the virus that changed the world

100 women who changed the world results. (Images by Getty Images)

100 Women Who Changed the World: your reactions

A 12th-century English manuscript shows a surgeon operating on a patient's eye. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Kill or cure? 10 medieval medical practices and their effectiveness

Nurses serve lunch to patients at a Birmingham hospital, 1939. (Photo by Humphrey Spender/Picture Post/Getty Images)

Paying for healthcare: life in Britain before the ‘free’ NHS

100women_800x530

100 Women Who Changed the World: the results

A New York opium den. Although US legislators cracked down on opiates in the early 20th century, organised crime networks continued to fuel the illegal trade in narcotics. (Photo by Getty Images)

Books interview with Lucy Inglis: “Opium has held mankind’s hand since the beginning”