Doctor bleeding a patient

Medicine and health

Elma Brenner on medieval wellbeing: "People in the Middle Ages were absolutely focused on staying healthy"

Dissection of human cadaver by physicians

Ask the medieval doctor: 6 ailments and their treatments.

Clothes infected by the Black Death are burned in medieval Europe, c1340. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Black Death facts: your guide to "the worst catastrophe in recorded history"

Why Florence Nightingale was so much more than the ‘Lady with the Lamp’.

Florence Nightingale

The life and legend of Florence Nightingale.

The effects of the disease known as the Black Death

History quiz: how much do you know about the Black Death?.

Dance of Death, printed by Jacob Meydenbach, Germany 1492. (Photo by Alamy)

The Black Death and social change.

Photograph of John Snow in 1856

The Broad Street cholera outbreak: how bad was it and how was it contained?.

A portrait of Florence Nightingale

Nursing by numbers: how Florence Nightingale campaigned for better conditions.

c1656: A plague doctor in protective clothing. The beak mask held spices thought to purify air, while the wand was used to avoid touching patients. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Q&AWhy did 17th-century plague doctors wear peculiar beaked masks?

The effects of the disease known as the Black Death

Black Death quarantine: how did we try to contain the most deadly disease in history?

Henry VIII

Q&AWhat was the Sweating Sickness? And how did Henry VIII ‘self-isolate’?

Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet

Jane Austen’s tips for “health and happiness”.

Photo of flu patients during the First World War

First World War

Q&AWhy was the 1918-19 pandemic known as Spanish Flu?

Illustration of Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19). (Photo by Alamy)

Coronavirus: a historical perspective.

A short history of quarantine.

Wartime evacuees wash their hands

“The very sight of her hands did almost turn my stomach”: a brief history of hand-washing.

The (not so) stinky Middle Ages: why medieval people were cleaner than we think

Medieval medicine.

A medieval monk praying in front of a table of apothacary's herbs

Beating the Black Death: did medieval medicine help people to survive?.

Midwives and babies in the sun

Midwifery and childbirth: a historical A–Z guide.

On 20 July 1969, Lunar Module 'Eagle' touched down gently on the Sea of Tranquility on the moon. (Photo by NASA/Newsmakers via Getty Images)

From ‘moon-germs’ to motion sickness: health and safety on NASA’s 1969 lunar landing mission.

US soldiers in Vietnam

From the Napoleonic Wars to Vietnam and Iraq: a history of war trauma.

Medieval trepanning

General prehistory

Q&AWhat is trepanning?

The ancient Greek physician Dioscorides

General ancient history

Happy plants and laughing weeds: how people of the ancient world used – and abused – drugs

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.

An ancient Roman relief shows a midwife delivering a baby. Many midwives had other occupations, and undertook the task as a contribution to their community. (Wellcome Images)

Call the (Roman) midwife

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)

The LibraryLady Sybil Grey: a lady in the line of fire.