Medicine and health

Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet

Jane Austen’s tips for “health and happiness”

Pro-choice and pro-life advocates outside the Supreme Court in the 1970s, following the Roe v Wade decision. (Photo by Diana Walker//The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images)

A brief history of US abortion law, before and after Roe v Wade

Edward Carey talks about Madame Tussaud on the History Extra podcast. (Wax Figure of Marie Tussaud (Photo by Getty Images)

The story of Madame Tussaud

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

Clothes infected by the Black Death being burnt, c 1340. An illustration from the 'Romance of Alexander' in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. (Photo by Hulton Archive/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 in her laboratory. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

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

A Red Cross worker in the United States wears a mask to reduce the risk of contracting or spreading the disease in 1918. Though doctors didn’t initially understand the nature of the infectious agent, ‘social distancing’ helped slow the propagation of the flu. (Photo by Paul Thompson/FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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