HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-12-05T14:38:54.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Aids: the epidemic that changed Britain
items: What was the Habsburg jaw?
items: Tales of the toilet: a historical A–Z
items: Marvellous medieval medicine: why their curious cures were better than you think
items: After Hiroshima: the atomic plague
items: How much do you know about the history of disease?
items: Give away your worries, like an ancient Mesopotamian
items: Did Adolf Hitler really only have one testicle?
items: The Victorians’ cocaine habit: why 19th-century Britain couldn't get enough of the 'miracle' drug
items: A history of happiness: 5 life lessons from the past

Aids: the epidemic that changed Britain
type: item
date: 2025-12-05T13:47:11.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Forty years ago, the UK found itself in the grip of a virus that killed thousands of people and sparked fear, confusion and prejudice – HIV. Janet Weston explores the Aids crisis as it unfolded throughout the 1980s, and how it transformed attitudes about everything from sexuality to healthcare
encoded: In the early 1980s, reports of a strange new disease began emerging from the United States. It was picked up in the British gay press – Gay News ran a story in November 1981 under the headline “Gay cancer or mass media scare?” – but relatively few people noticed. Even among those who did, confusion and doubt reigned: weren’t these tales of a “gay cancer” just fear-mongering, a backlash against the gains of the fight for gay liberation in the 1970s? How could a disease target gay men, anyway? Such suspicions were not without good reason. The medical profession had a difficult history with people who didn’t conform to heterosexual norms: less than 10 years earlier, homosexuality had still been categorised by the internationally influential American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder. And when it came to Aids, the lack of knowledge about its cause or mode of transmission led to wild speculation. One theory linked Aids to the use of “poppers”, a recreational drug popular on the gay scene; another proposed that Aids was the end point of too many sexually transmitted infections. The picture grew still more complex as the symptoms associated with this new illness were also identified both among injecting drug users and people with the blood-clotting disorder haemophilia, including women and children. By July 1983, there had been 14 reported cases of Aids in Britain, all among men. Most were gay, including one man who also injected drugs, but the group included another who had been receiving treatment for haemophilia in the form of blood products. Just two months later, the number had risen to 24, and included a woman and a second man with haemophilia. As numbers of diagnoses in the United Kingdom started to rise sharply, the deaths began. Many people died very soon after diagnosis, as an array of opportunistic infections took advantage of their weakened immune systems. Terrence Higgins died in July 1982, one of the first deaths in the UK attributed to Aids. His p…

https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2021/09/shutterstockeditorial130824acmyk-2534e11-e1764943016195.jpg
width: 1512
height: 1000

What was the Habsburg jaw?
type: item
date: 2025-11-26T10:13:30.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Evergreen
description: One family was an ever-present force in European affairs from the Middle Ages to the modern era, but, as Jonny Wilkes explores, the Habsburgs’ desperate bid to keep power within the family gave them a distinctive physical callsign, as well as dynastic longevity…
encoded: For centuries, the Habsburgs were one of the most prominent royal dynasties in Europe. They ruled as kings of Germany, from the 13th century, and as archdukes of Austria from the mid-14th century. They sat on the throne of the Holy Roman Empire from the 15th to 19th centuries. Their house dominated swathes of the continent with Habsburg rulers in a host of countries, most notably Spain. But there was something else that became prominent about the Habsburgs: their jawline. What was the Habsburg jaw? Many members of the dynasty had the same physical trait of a protruding bottom jaw – a mandibular prognathism, medically speaking. The jutting chin could be so pronounced that the flattering portrait artists of the day could not manage to hide them. The condition even prevented some members of the dynasty from eating or speaking properly. Read more | The Habsburgs: the dynasty that wouldn’t die The ‘Habsburg jaw’ was a biological result from generations of inbreeding. In a bid to keep their power, the Habsburgs kept everything within the family. They relied on ‘consanguine’ marriages that partnered close relatives, such as first cousins, or uncles with their nieces. View Green Video on the source website Why did the Habsburgs intermarry so much? It’s true that close-family marriages weren’t exactly unusual among the royal houses of Europe, but the Habsburgs were the champions of consanguinity. Of the 11 marriages during the reign of the Spanish Habsburgs, from 1516 to 1700, only two were not incestuous. “The arrangement made good political sense, guaranteeing that the two lines would support each other militarily,” writes historian Martyn Rady, “which paid dividends in the Thirty Years’ War (the bloody religious conflict fought across central Europe from 1618–48). “Biologically, however, it was a disaster. As first and second-cousin and uncle-niece marriages became the norm, madness and deformity followed.” In 1517, Italian diplomat Antonio di Beatis described the future …

Habsburg-Chin-Getty-Images-caf45b9.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000

Tales of the toilet: a historical A–Z
type: item
date: 2025-11-19T16:03:17.000Z
creator: Julian Humphrys
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: When was the first toilet invented? What did people use before the modern flush? What are the origins of the term 'crapper'? To mark World Toilet Day, Julian Humphrys explores the history of Britain's loos
encoded: A... is for Ajax Although Elizabethan writer and courtier John Harrington wasn’t the first person to design a flushing toilet – Londoner Thomas Brightfield had done so in 1449 – he was the first to provide a written specification for one. In 1596, he penned his Metamorphosis of Ajax (a pun on ‘jakes’, a slang word for a privy) in which he described a remarkably modern-sounding device that he’d installed in his house. This incorporated a pan with a seat and a cistern filled with water. When a handle was turned, the water washed the contents of the pan into a cesspool. Although Harrington installed one for Queen Elizabeth I in Richmond Palace, cost, problems of water supply, and lack of sewers meant that the idea wouldn’t catch on for centuries. B... is for Bazalgette By the 1850s, London’s growing population was producing unmanageable amounts of sewage. Cesspools leaked and overflowed, contaminating water supplies, and matters weren’t helped by the outpourings of the increasingly popular water closet. London’s Commission of Sewers had ordered that cesspools and house drains should be connected to sewers, but these fed directly into an increasingly noisome River Thames. Following the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858, when the smell from the river was so bad that MPs even considered abandoning Westminster, the Metropolitan Board of Works was tasked with overhauling London’s sewerage system. Civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette (1819–91) was put in charge of operations. His 16-year project included embanking parts of the Thames, constructing 1,100 miles of street sewers, 82 miles of main interceptor sewers and building four monumental pumping stations, all designed to take the sewage eastwards to be discharged into the river away from heavily-populated areas. Watch | 10 minutes of toilets through time View Green Video on the source website C... is for Crapper In 1866, Yorkshire-born industrialist and plumber Thomas Crapper opened the world’s first bathroom showroom in Chelsea. For the…

GettyImages-639163710-b34d96f-e1763568963107.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000

Marvellous medieval medicine: why their curious cures were better than you think
type: item
date: 2025-11-05T09:00:32.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Medieval life
description: What did medieval physicians prescribe for stomach ache? And could weasels’ testicles really help you conceive? James Freeman delves into the sources to find eight curious cures from the Middle Ages
encoded: My urine has turned black! What does your wee say about your health? Well, plenty – but perhaps not in quite the way medieval physicians understood it. Before the in-depth study of anatomy and physiology, establishing the causes of symptoms relied on theories that today seem primitive or foolish. However, they were often based on long-established ideas about the body and its function. Medieval treatises on uroscopy – the study of urine – identified up to 20 colours, each indicating certain diseases. Many texts on this subject were accompanied by drawings of glass flasks filled with liquid coloured with an appropriate pigment. These might be arranged in a circular shape with descriptive labels, helping readers to memorise the key diagnostic details. Perhaps unsurprisingly, black was the worst possible colour, and was generally agreed to indicate imminent death. Why was urine so significant? Because of prohibitions against opening the body (which extended to postmortem dissections), medieval doctors were reliant on external indicators. This included variations in a patient’s pulse but also the colour, texture, layers, smell and even taste of their urine. The doctor’s role was to understand a patient’s nature: specifically, the four fluids or ‘humours’ inside the human body. In the treatise De Natura Hominis (‘On the Nature of Man’), by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (c460–c375 BC) or his pupil Polybus, it was determined that there were four such humours: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Disease was caused by imbalances in these humours, or when they became ‘corrupted’ or concentrated in a part of the body. Read more | It felt like the end of the world, but this medieval ‘apocalypse’ left a legacy no one saw coming This theory was developed further by Galen of Pergamon (c129–c216), who likened digestion to the cooking process: food was converted into life-giving liquid, the humours were generated by the vital organs, and waste products – including ur…

LEAD-MedievalCureswebready-a754a26.jpg
width: 953
height: 903

After Hiroshima: the atomic plague
type: item
date: 2025-09-08T08:00:06.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: A big day in history
subject: Death
subject: Hiroshima
description: In the wake of the nuclear attacks on Japan, the official Allied line was that radiation sickness was not a danger. Yet, as Steve O’Hagan reveals, the first western journalist to witness the effects on the people of Hiroshima told a very different story
encoded: At 6am on 2 September 1945, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett boarded a crowded train heading south-west from the wreckage of war-ravaged Tokyo. He was disobeying strict orders that no westerners should venture outside the Japanese capital – and, though he did not yet realise it, he was undertaking the most momentous journey of his life. The Second World War had ended. However, Japan had not formally surrendered, and American occupation was still to come. Japan’s cities lay in ruins, and Burchett couldn’t even be sure that the train line to his destination, over 400 miles away, was intact. He was also alone and in great danger – hence the Colt .45 pistol in his suitcase. Resentment towards the Allies ran high. Crammed around Burchett in his carriage were Japanese Army officers bearing samurai swords. Although he spoke almost no Japanese, Burchett could feel the animosity in the soldiers’ venomous stares. Also among the passengers was an American priest, who nervously warned Burchett that one wrong move could cost them their lives. Should they smile or shake hands, it could be taken by the Japanese officers as a sign of gloating over the Japanese surrender to the Allies that was being formalised later that day. Burchett later recalled glancing nervously at the soldiers: their hands seemed to toy with the hilts of their swords. As the train plunged in and out of long, dark tunnels, he was convinced that he could hear the sound of steel being unsheathed from scabbards. Thankfully, the assault he feared never came. But even as the train reached its destination some 20 hours after setting out, his tension did not abate. He was arriving in Hiroshima – the city that, four weeks earlier, had been nigh obliterated by the world’s first ever nuclear bomb attack. In one of the 20th century’s most remarkable feats of investigative reporting, Burchett was about to become the first western journalist to bear witness to the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. A scramble to contr…

GETTYTOPFOTOHiroshimaAFTERMATHopener-WL-380812d.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000

How much do you know about the history of disease?
type: item
date: 2025-07-07T07:00:55.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: From the Broadstreet pump to "lock hospitals", test your knowledge on the history of disease...
encoded: View Riddle on the source website

https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-1148020259-1-d1feef0-e1751382194454.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000

Give away your worries, like an ancient Mesopotamian
type: item
date: 2025-06-07T08:30:06.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove, FSA
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: What can we learn about managing worrying from the people of ancient Assyria and Babylonia? Dr Selena Wisnom offers some Near Eastern wisdom to Dave Musgrove
encoded: Do you worry about things? Do you wake up in the middle of the night, sweating about what might happen to you, to your family, to the world in general? I do. If you do too, rest assured you’re not alone. It’s a natural human trait, and it’s something people have been doing for millennia. In evolutionary terms, I imagine it’s something to do with forcing our minds to think about the things we ought to be doing next to keep ourselves alive, and keep us out of dangerous situations. It’s counterproductive, of course, to worry yourself into a state of paralysis – that’s when worrying goes wrong. Are there any lessons we can take from history that can help us worry productively? I went to the Assyria Galleries in the British Museum late one Friday afternoon to reflect on this. They are well worth a visit, whether you’re a worrier or not. Turn left at the main entrance and you’re straight into them. I wanted to go there because Dr Selena Wisnom, an expert on the history and heritage of ancient Mesopotamia and author of the excellent new book The Library of Ancient Wisdom (Penguin, 2025), had told me these people were worriers of renown: “They worry so much that they invent an entire branch of scholarship devoted to it. This is worrying on a kind of national cosmic scale.” This organised worrying was called ‘lamentation’. It wasn’t just a private matter – it was ritualised, institutionalised and shared across the whole society. We know they worried and lamented because they wrote about it. I wanted to get up close and personal with some ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform script. There is a lot of cuneiform script on display in the British Museum. I can’t read it – and there aren’t many people who can – but I figured it would be instructive just to look at it, and think a bit about the people who carved it. Hands and minds of the Mesopotamians Cuneiform is the writing system that they used in Mesopotamia. It was invented in the mid-fourth millennium BC and used for millennia aft…

Substack-History-Worrying-Kate-Hazell-rectangle-14a3a38.jpg
width: 2126
height: 1417

Did Adolf Hitler really only have one testicle?
type: item
date: 2025-05-07T08:22:54.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Evergreen
description: Although British soldiers in the Second World War sang about the Führer only having “one ball”, that did not necessarily make it anatomical fact. The discovery of medical records from his time in prison, however, paint a surprisingly complicated story
encoded: “Hitler has only got one ball, / Goring has two but very small, / Himmler is rather sim’lar, / But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.” This cheeky wartime ditty mocking the masculinity of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi leadership, set to the jaunty tune of the Coloney Bogey March, was once a familiar favourite in schoolyards in Britain and beyond. The lyrics often change – in one variant, it is suggested in rhyme that the Fuhrer’s remaining testicle now resides as something of a war trophy in the Albert Hall – but where does this claim come from, and is there any truth to it? Is there any truth that Hitler had one testicle? On balance it seems unlikely that Hitler only had one testicle, but there are conflicting arguments on both sides. That said, there have been several stories that, if true, would mean the song was actually based on anatomical fact. According to one, Hitler lost a testicle during the First World War after being hit by shrapnel at the battle of the Somme in 1916; another says the injury occurred much earlier, in childhood, during an altercation with a goat. It all seems to be the stuff of hearsay. Although Hitler was wounded at the Somme, it was in the thigh rather than the groin. What’s more, that claim comes from many decades later from an unconfirmed source, a priest who supposedly took the confession of the German medic who treated Lance Corporal Hitler. Perhaps the single best piece of evidence that counters the claim that Hitler only had one testicle comes from the doctor who treated Hitler as a child, an Austrian Jew named Eduard Bloch who fled to the United States in 1940, insisted to American interrogators that the genitals of the future Fuhrer were “completely normal”. Still, the seemingly endless fascination with Hitler’s reproductive equipment and sexual proclivities has persisted over the decades. Years after the war, a new claim emerged that the Soviets had carried out an autopsy of Hitler after taking Berlin in 1945, in which they fou…

Hitlers-Deficiency-WL-57d1754.jpg
width: 620
height: 413

The Victorians’ cocaine habit: why 19th-century Britain couldn't get enough of the 'miracle' drug
type: item
date: 2025-03-20T15:45:56.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
description: In the 19th century, a magic new drug took the medical community by storm, riding a wave of scientific endeavour. But, writes Douglas Small, it wasn’t long before the dark side of this miraculous substance began to emerge
encoded: On a drab January day in 1890, journalist Marian von Glehn made her way through the "roar and rattle" of the City of London. Her destination, squeezed in among densely packed warehouses in the Moorfields district, was a massive, grubby, utilitarian building: the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital. Behind that unpromising facade, though, von Glehn was about to witness a miracle of modern medicine. Writing for The Leisure Hour magazine, she recounted seeing a small group of nervous patients gathering outside an operating theatre. Surrounded by powerful gas lamps, reflectors and rows of “coloured phials that would have delighted the eyes of a Dutch painter”, the hospital’s nurses began to drift quietly among their charges. Into the eyes of these patients, nurses dripped a “newly discovered... magic drug” – one that would “deaden and allay the pain” of imminent operations and “inspire their patients with courage and confidence”. The miraculous-seeming substance being administered was cocaine – and it soon captured the imagination of the Victorian public in a way that few other drugs have done, either before or since. Numb luck Cocaine was first isolated and extracted from the leaves of coca plants, traditionally cultivated on the slopes of the Andes, in 1855. It gained its well-known common name in 1860. However, the drug’s discovery initially passed largely unnoticed outside the specialised realms of organic chemistry. For the first few decades, one medical writer recounted, cocaine seemed to be nothing more than an “obscure [and] useless alkaloid”. Then, in 1884, cocaine came to the attention of medical professionals worldwide when Karl Koller, a trainee ophthalmologist in the eye surgery department of Vienna General Hospital, realised that applying the compound to the surface of the eye completely blocked any sensation of pain. That discovery heralded the advent of a completely new class of medications: local anaesthetics. For the first time it became possible to under…

cocoa-plant-dreamstimexl30424738-8686b8b.jpg
width: 3761
height: 2506

A history of happiness: 5 life lessons from the past
type: item
date: 2025-03-07T13:32:18.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: What can history teach us about how to find joy? Katie Barclay shares five lessons from the past about the pursuit of happiness
encoded: 1. Don’t bank on money alone The subject of whether wealth can bring true happiness has been passionately debated across the centuries. Money can’t buy you happiness, it’s often said. But did our ancestors agree? That depends on who you ask, and on how we define and measure happiness – something that has varied across time, cultures and languages. Is it just a state of mind, describing the way we feel? Or does happiness require us to be healthy, wealthy and wise? Interestingly, research has shown that wealth is actually a pretty good predictor of happiness, but throughout history people have cautioned against relying on material accumulation to achieve a blissful life. Historical studies of happiness have often been guided by the ancient Greek term eudaimonia, meaning the condition of living well – and societies and individuals able to live well enjoy more opportunities for happiness. Many ancient Greeks were, though, sceptical of the idea that happiness was achievable in this life, associating that state solely with the afterlife. In a (likely fictional) conversation in the sixth century BC, the legendarily wealthy Lydian king Croesus asked Athenian lawmaker Solon whether he had met anyone better off than him. Solon listed several men who lived honourable and sacrificial lives, dying for their people. When Croesus asked whether his own eudaimonia – his economic success and luxurious lifestyle – meant nothing, Solon replied that you could not judge whether a person was happy until they had ended their life well, emphasising virtuous living over material pleasures. The philosopher Democritus similarly argued that “both happiness and misfortune pertain to the soul. Happiness does not reside in cattle or gold,” advising people to put aside their worldly concerns. In contrast, 18th-century American revolutionaries placed the “pursuit of Happiness” at the heart of their vision for a new nation, writing it into the Declaration of Independence. With the rapid growth in wea…

AKG998790-cmyk-02c6ad5.jpg
width: 2362
height: 1623