Author: Guest contributor

In the preface to The Anatomy of Sleep Jamaican–Scottish physician Edward Binns (1804–1851) claims to have written the first ever treatise on “procuring sleep at will, by directing the activity of the cerebral organs”. But that isn’t the only first… Continue reading

Wellcome MS. 632 may be the only surviving ‘birth girdle’ in England that was actually used during childbirth. This parchment roll survives as a rare artefact from a time when women, who could afford it, gave birth in well-furnished darkened… Continue reading

How did the so-called ‘sea cure’ supplant the taking of waters at fashionable spas for Georgian England’s worried well? This was the question I sought answers for in the Wellcome Library’s collections. There I found several intriguing medical tracts, not… Continue reading

Cardiac arrest is a popular narrative device in TV and film. However, on screen, it is shown to have much better odds of survival than in real life. During fictional hospital resuscitations, the dramatic significance of eye contact between team… Continue reading

Paper proposals are invited for a conference on ‘Bodily fluids/fluid bodies in Greek and Roman Antiquity’ that will take place at St Michael’s College, Cardiff, 11–13 July 2016. The conference is organised by Dr Victoria Leonard (Cardiff) and Dr Laurence… Continue reading

I have recently completed a new descriptive catalogue of the 16 Greek manuscripts held by the Wellcome Library. The catalogue was published in the journal Medical History with contributions from Dr Georgi R. Parpulov. Some of these manuscripts contain previously… Continue reading

Paper proposals are invited for a conference on ‘Religion and medicine: healing the body and soul from the Middle Ages to the modern day’ that will take place at Birkbeck, University of London, 15–16 July 2016. The conference is convened… Continue reading

In her inaugural post on the Early Medicine blog, Elma Brenner used an iconic image of the female practitioner ‘Trotula’ to introduce the new digitisation of Wellcome MS. 544, a 14th-century collection of Latin medical texts. Many students of the… Continue reading

What can you learn from old bones? Rachel Ives explains what they tell us about the lives and deaths of the dead, and how osteologists use historical sources such as the Medical Officer of Health reports to confirm their findings… Continue reading

The Wellcome Library houses some 300 manuscripts produced in the Middle Ages – that is, between about 400 and 1500 AD. What these manuscripts have in common is that they all, somehow, relate to medicine and health during this period… Continue reading