Author: Guest contributor

The 1960s was a good time to own Britain’s biggest condom factory, but the London Rubber Company (LRC) was not without its problems. Despite record sales and increased condom use, there was a distinctly oestrogenic blot on the horizon. The… Continue reading

Several years ago my colleague Neil Pemberton asked me when police started using tape to mark out and protect crime scenes. Though I had written extensively on the history of forensics I had no ready answer. As we talked it… Continue reading

From the ancient world to the present, people have turned to powerful words, symbols and images as magical shields against bad luck, evil spirits, debilitating illness and sudden death. In medieval and early modern Europe, textual amulets on parchment and… Continue reading

This three-day conference marks the 10th Anniversary Annual Meeting on ‘Disease, disability and medicine in medieval Europe’. It will be hosted by Swansea University at the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, 2–4 December 2016. The conference aims to explore the interactions between disability… Continue reading

For the next in our series on Crick and Consciousness, Dr Emma Sutton contrasts Francis Crick’s materialist science of consciousness with that of 19th century psychologist William James, who developed a much broader understanding of what ‘counts’ as scientific evidence.… Continue reading

In the next in our series about Crick and Consciousness, Dr Christine Aicardi tells us how she came to the conclusion that there may have been one underlying motivation for all of Crick’s research choices across different scientific fields. Although… Continue reading

On Friday 20 May 2016, the Wellcome Library hosted a workshop (for the programme, see a previous post) that aimed to bring about new discussions on incunabula, the earliest printed books, and medicine. This was the first time that the… Continue reading

The remarkable manuscript image of the wound man did not die with the medieval medical world that created it, finding a rich afterlife in the Renaissance and beyond. With the adoption of new print technologies in the second half of… Continue reading

The ‘wound man’ is an enigmatic and troubling figure from the world of medieval and early modern medical manuscripts.     Staring impassively out of the page, he bears a multitude of graphic wounds. His skin is covered in bleeding… Continue reading

Nowadays spectacles are commonplace, but in the 19th century some commentators were alarmed by their proliferation. The author of the ‘Health, Beauty and the Toilet’ column, for example, asked “WHY do we see so many children wearing glasses now-a-days, when… Continue reading