Author: Lalita Kaplish

Malaria kills around half a million people a year, most of them children under five. World Malaria Day, 25 April, is an annual reminder that the war against this killer disease continues. Since the 19th century there has been a… Continue reading

Couldn’t make it to Professor Andrew Scull’s terrific Porter Lecture on madness and civilization at Wellcome Collection? The helpful people at the History of Human Sciences Journal tweeted a ‘blow by blow’ account which they’ve storified into a handy guide… Continue reading

Lots of people are talking about happiness, and not just because 20 March is International Day of Happiness. Links between health and happiness have been around for a long time, as this 18th century cartoon shows. In the drawing, a… Continue reading

On International Women’s Day (8 March) we’re looking back to a Wellcome exhibition called Hygieia’s Handmaids: women health and healing. The catalogue for the exhibition, which has been digitised and is available online,  makes a useful resource for the history of… Continue reading

With World Mental Health Day coming up on October 10, we’ve decided to dedicate all this week on the Wellcome Library blog to mental health themes. On Tuesday Anna Ostrowska discusses Abandoned Goods, a documentary film about ‘asylum art’, showing… Continue reading

We’re planning some exciting new developments to the Wellcome Library blog and we’d like to take your views into account. Whether you are a regular reader, an occasional visitor, or you’ve just discovered us, we’d like to hear from you.… Continue reading

At the Wellcome Library, we’re always looking to improve users’ experience on our website, whether searching for a book, reading a digitised archive or downloading an image. We’re currently inviting users to carry out remote usability testing on our website. We… Continue reading

The human genome has been described in many ways: ‘the book of life’, a set of instructions, a language to be decoded. For many scientists it is a huge data set to be collected and analysed. Besides the metaphors associated… Continue reading

With the first section of the papers of geneticist John Sulston now catalogued and the recent addition of the digitised Alan Coulson papers online at Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics, we’ve decided to make this Genomics History Week at the… Continue reading

The medical officers of health for the Port of London had a unique job travelling up and down the Thames from London to the Thames Estuary, inspecting the cargo and crew of ships from around the world. The rapid spread… Continue reading