Doctor bleeding a patient

Medicine and health

A Red Cross worker in the United States, 1918

Spanish flu: the virus that changed the world.

Women 'take the air' in an attempt to ward off the Spanish Flu

"Far too little, too late": what happened when Spanish Flu hit Britain?.

Mary Seacole is best known for her work during the Crimean War, where she cared for injured soldiers. But she was also well-known as a hotelier, traveller and author – a celebrity of the Victorian era. This is a contemporary painting of her

Mary SeacoleVictorian celebrity, joyful hotelier and Crimean nurse

17th-century London: a city shaped by catastrophe.

Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the US

Elizabeth BlackwellThe ‘first female doctor’, who entered medicine to prove a point

Illustration of the Black Death from the Chroicles of Gilles Li Muisis (1272-1352), Abbaye Saint-Martin de Tournai (Photo by Alamy)

The Black Death: everything you wanted to know.

Student nurse Dorothy Norris

A brief guide to the history of the NHS.

The NHS: a brief history.

The race for vaccines: lessons from history.

Edward Jenner performs a vaccination, in an 1802 cartoon that lampoons the notion that being vaccinated will turn you into a cow

The race for a cure: how we found vaccines for 4 of history's most dangerous diseases.

(L to R) Isaac Newton, Henry VIII and Bal Gangadhar Tilak

How did people cope with ‘lockdowns’ of the past? And were they really all so productive?.

19th century advert for snuff

Q&AWhat was snuff?

Edward Jenner

Q&AWhen did medical practitioners start to be called ‘doctor’?

Alfred Nobel (Bettmann/Getty Images)

The history of the Nobel Prizes

Roman toilet

Tales of the toilet: a historical A–Z.

Map of the universe, miniature from The Tales of Luqman, Arabic manuscript, 1583. (Photo by Getty Images)

Ingenious medieval science.

Dr Edward Jenner, a British physician, performing his first vaccination on James Phipps, a boy of eight, in 1796. (Photo by Getty Images)

The history of vaccination: from Edward Jenner to anti-vaxxers.

The history of medicine: everything you wanted to know.

The Regency era: everything you wanted to know.

Covid-19 saw the UK’s universities, such as the University of Glasgow (above), cancel in-person teaching. The logistics of teaching and studying during the pandemic are proving complex. (Photo by Dreamstime)

How Covid-19 is forcing universities to change

Photographs documenting the facial reconstruction of a soldier whose cheek was extensively wounded during the Battle of the Somme

What happened to the 8 million people who were disabled during WW1?.

Dr Michael Mosley holds up a tapeworm

Tapeworms, arsenic and magic soap: fact-checking history’s weirdest fad diets and weight-loss gimmicks.

Why was there a backlash against face masks during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918?.

The birth pains of the NHS: how Britain's National Health Service was created.

The bikini was showcased to the world for the first time in July 1946. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

8 historical events that happened in July

Japanese school girls wear protective masks to guard against the influenza outbreak, February 1920. (Photo by Getty Images)

A history of pandemics: from Spanish Flu to Covid-19.

Saturday lecture: Medieval disease and medicine.

An engraving depicting a scene of chaos at Bethlem Royal Hospital

Bethlem Royal Hospital: why did the infamous Bedlam asylum have such a fearsome reputation?

Surviving the Great Plague.

A couple get amorous in this 14th-century illustration

Call the medieval sex doctor: how 7 problems might have been treated in the Middle Ages.