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  • Image from midwifery book.

    Images on the move in Mauriceau’s ‘The diseases of women’

    08/11/2016

    Looking through copies of ‘The diseases of women with child and in child-bed’, the English translation of the seminal work on midwifery by François Mauriceau (1637–1709) first published in French in 1668, I noticed something distinctive. While in some editions… Continue reading

  • Alchemical furnaces

    Alchemy and the quest for long life: Wellcome MS. 446

    23/06/2015

    Alchemy, with its cryptic language and fantastic symbolism, evokes many aspects of the culture of the Middle Ages. In alchemical manuscripts, drawings of alembics, funnels and furnaces vividly represent this long lost art. Alchemy’s goal of transmuting base metal into… Continue reading

  • What does a genome look like?

    18/07/2014

    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

  • The Sick Rose

    02/06/2014

    Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow, Richard Barnett’s new book, The Sick Rose is about disease and the art of medical illustration. Largely based on images from the Wellcome Library collections, its contents are at times explicit and uncompromising representations of  illness.… Continue reading

  • Birth: a changing scene. Part II: A controversial figure of man-midwife

    10/12/2012

    Is it a man? Is it a woman? No, it is a man-midwife, a figure that stirred much controversy upon its arrival on the British soil in the beginning of the 18th century. The alleged hermaphroditism of a man-midwife, as… Continue reading

  • ‘The Beauty of Diagrams’

    20/12/2010

    On 16th December, BBC4 broadcast the most recent episode of their series The Beauty of Diagrams, in which mathematician Marcus du Sautoy explores the stories behind some of the world’s most familiar and influential scientific diagrams. The latest featured diagram… Continue reading

  • A trip to Hollingsville

    18/06/2010

    Currently being broadcast on Resonance FM is Hollingsville, a series in which each week writer Ken Hollings and guests explore “different aspects of our historical relationship with technology, from architecture to bodies and from computers to phantoms”. Last week, the… Continue reading

  • 10th Wellcome Image Awards

    15/10/2009

    Dr Alice M Roberts, best known for her television appearances on BBC’s Don’t Die Young and The Incredible Human Journey, presented the winners of the 2009 Wellcome Image Awards with their trophies last night at Wellcome Collection. This year sees… Continue reading

  • The continued adventures of Wound Man

    22/05/2009

    Late medieval anatomy works often contain a standard set of illustrations, copied and recopied from text to text. Typically, these depict the body front and back; the skeleton and muscles within it each from the same two viewpoints, and so… Continue reading

  • Centenary: Stacey Hopper, born 28 April 1909

    28/04/2009

    The artist Stacey Hopper was born exactly 100 years ago, at Aberaman, now part of the town of Aberdare, South Wales, on 28 April 1909. Thousands of people will have seen his work without knowing his name. His claim to… Continue reading