Salvarsan was the world's first medical ‘magic bullet’. Felipe Martínez-Fernández traces how this experimental compound evolved into a global commodity and a fixture of popular culture.

The dance of death: the dram shop. Coloured aquatint after T. Rowlandson, 1816. Thomas Rowlandson ...

A surgeon extracting "pierres de tête". Oil painting after H. Weydmans. Weydmans, H.

Credit: General report of the Commission appointed for improving the sanitary condition of barracks and hospitals / [(signed) John Sutherland, W.H. Burrell, Douglas Galton]. Source: Wellcome ...

History is dominated by A-list deaths: queens beheaded, archdukes assassinated. But what about everyone else? How did ordinary people depart this life and grieve for loved ones, and which of the old ...

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 ...

In the five centuries since Europeans were introduced to tobacco, smoking has generated considerable controversy. This gallery tracks shifting views on smoking and health, from life-saving stimulant ...

Many artists in the 1980s and 1990s turned their art into activism to raise awareness of the emerging AIDS epidemic. These public health posters from around the world show how they creatively ...

St James’s Gardens, a former burial ground next to London’s Euston Station, closed in summer 2017 for work on the new HS2 rail line. Removing the tens of thousands of bodies buried on the site ...

Approximately halfway through my master’s I stopped being able to cope. It might have been because I was being kept awake by second-year student parties until five in the morning, or because I ...

When A-level grades were announced in August 2020, it was clear that the algorithm designed to combat grade inflation had unfairly disadvantaged students who went to state schools in comparison with ...

Approximately halfway through my master’s I stopped being able to cope. It might have been because I was being kept awake by second-year student parties until five in the morning, or because I ...