Doctor bleeding a patient

Medicine and health

Hidden livesVictorian fasting girls

Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert and Edward Jenner

My history heroDame Sarah Gilbert chooses Edward Jenner

Ilustration showing thorned brambles growing up the nervous system of a pink torso, the brambles at the bottom of the piece are growing in the shape of a uterus, and there are blackberries where the ovaries should be. A blue, gloved hand is coming in from the left to pluck at the ovary blackberry, and another gloved hand coming in from the right is using gardening secateurs to cut one of the branches. A metaphor for endometriosis, and in a broader sense, women's medical neglect and oppression

The gender pain gap: perceptions of women's health through history

Illustration showing woman receiving a caesarean section

General History

Q&AWhat are the origins of the caesarean section?

Q&AWhich king thought he was made of glass

Reverend Spencer Parsons, head of the Chicago branch of the Clergy Consultation Service (CCS), an interfaith group dedicated to helping women obtain abortions before 'Roe v Wade'

The American clergy who helped women get abortions before Roe v Wade

A British poster dated 1917 designed by Bert Thomas. (Photo by Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)

A brief history of smoking

Jesus is shown cleansing ten lepers in a scene from the Gospel According to Luke, illustrated in an 11th-century manuscript

General History

LeprosyHow has the disease been perceived and treated through history?

Portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, showing his pronounced Habsburg jaw

Q&AWhat was the Habsburg jaw?

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

A woodcut of the brain from Andreas Vesalius’s groundbreaking 1543 treatise On the Fabric of the Human Body

The Elizabethans' complex relationship with mental wellbeing

Plastic surgery: transformed by WW1

The birth of insulin: a scientific drama

Dr DA Henderson examines children’s smallpox vaccination scars in Ethiopia

Why we should remember…Target Zero Day

Episode 6How the pandemic transformed societies

Catherine the Great: inoculation pioneer

Episode 5Death, sin & spirituality

Domenico Fetti painting illustrating a melancholic woman in the early 17th century

The Anatomy of Melancholy: how Robert Burton helped shape our understanding of the mind

Episode 4Medieval medical thinking

Episode 3Living through the plague

Episode 2Origins & spread

A young woman sat in front of a mirror applies lipstick, 1967

The price of beauty: the dangerous cosmetics used until the 20th century

The history of beauty: everything you wanted to know

Episode 1Introduction

A stone statue of a woman's torso with a drop of blood over the abdomen, representing women's bodies and menstruation

General History

A history of menstruation

Gardens and the scientific revolution

Periods, fertility & childbirth: a pre-modern history

Outbreak of dance mania

The medieval dancing plague: what caused people to dance themselves to death?

Turning points1348: The Black Death

A woman slops here chamberpot from a window onto pedestrians in the street below in this woodcut

Were medieval cities really filthy?