From the Collections

On World Water Day the book Women, Plumbers and Doctors caught my eye. It seems an unusual title for a book from 1885, but when you turn the front cover over it becomes apparent that this quirky title is a manual of household… 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

The Sweating Sickness was a new phenomenon in later 15th and 16th century Europe, recognised by contemporaries as being distinctively different from the plague and other epidemic diseases. The illness was almost exclusively confined to England, and was soon known… 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

William Palmer was a surgeon “of superior degree of instruction”, whose profligate lifestyle led to his ungracious demise in the mid-19th century. Palmer was charged in 1856 with the “wilful poisoning”, with strychnine, of his ‘friend’ and horse-racing partner, John Parsons Cook (to whom he… Continue reading

Fancy solving a crime? Enter the macabre world of forensic pathology from today with the opening of Forensics: the anatomy of crime in Wellcome Collection’s newly refurbished Gallery 1. Arguably one of the most intriguing items from the Wellcome Library on display in this fascinating exhibition are the… Continue reading

Jodocus Müller, city apothecary of Dresden, was a prominent and presumably wealthy citizen of that town. In a certificate of 1675 he listed the six pursuits to which he had dedicated his life:  To learn the ‘A. B. C.,’ to… Continue reading

We’ve all heard of the Grand Tour, when 18th century Englishmen went off to the Continent to further their cultural education and cultivate their aesthetic tastes, returning with paintings and statuary to adorn their homes. But what about traffic in… Continue reading

Fancy a romantic get-away this Valentine’s day? Forget weekends in Paris, fancy hotels, red roses and oversized teddy bears; from 1946, volunteers flocked to the MRC Common Cold Research Unit (CCU) in Salisbury for a holiday with a twist –… Continue reading

Smallpox plagued medieval Japan, the disease was thought to be brought on by an Onryō (怨霊), a vengeful mythological spirit. This specific spirit or demon was eventually given the name Hōsōshin (疱瘡神). In the tale of Tametomo and Hōsōshin, the… Continue reading