A mesmerist using animal magnetism on a seated female patient. Wood engraving, ca. 1845. Date: [approximately 1845] Reference: 11823i ...

Posters by artists who turned their art into activism to support their communities and raise awareness of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s.

How do you avoid catching the plague? Smoke constantly. Carry a sponge soaked in vinegar. Hang oranges studded with cloves around your house. This was the best medical advice available circa 1665, as ...

Today smoking is seen publicly as a deadly vice, privately perhaps as more of a guilty pleasure. Follow tobacco’s journey over the centuries from medical remedy to killer carcinogen.

In 1950, an American journalist popularised the term ‘brainwashing’, arguing that a new amalgam of technology, medicine and ideology was allowing an onslaught on people’s minds. In this abridged ...

The efficacy of antibiotics and the demands of work mean we rarely convalesce after an illness. But in the past it was an important part of the return to health.

Nymphomania has traditionally been defined as an increased and therefore disturbing sexual drive. It was thought of as a serious medical condition particularly affecting women, who were often given ...

What is the ideal pillow? In Chinese culture, the ideal shifted over time, and views on a good sleep also reveal attitudes about studying, love, food and drink.

Ours is the age of contagious anxiety. We feel overwhelmed by the events around us, by injustice, by suffering, by an endless feeling of crisis. So how can we nurture the parts of ourselves that hope, ...

Today in the UK we rarely sit with, touch, or perhaps even see our loved ones after they’ve died. Past practices were very different and, Claire Cock-Starkey argues, were more helpful for those ...

When you looked at this image of a Chinese goddess, did you notice the white collar she wears? It is called the cloud collar 云肩 and reflects ancient cosmological wisdom. It has a circle at the centre, ...

Fashionable seaside towns in England owe much of their popularity to 18th-century doctors, who advised them to take the 'sea cure'.