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There are cases where the towering homogeneity of Victorian culture is exaggerated. The era of Prince Albert and Lord Palmerston was,...

Midwife. Few words in the history of western medicine can evoke sudden and unequivocal academic tribal sentiment as that single term. To...

In 1896, the city of Bombay recorded its first case of bubonic plague, a disease which would grow to claim 10 million lives over the...

The long life of Elizabeth Blackwell (1818–1910), the world’s first woman to earn a medical degree, can be divided into two roughly equal...

A young mother of the early twentieth century who could not or did not want to breast feed was a creature entirely at the hands of...

It is sometime in the 1930s, and you are walking into a ward full of crouching children with blue-tinted lips. Something is wrong with...

In 1923, when Estelle Massey graduated from the City Hospital No. 2 School of Nursing with the highest examination score in the entire...

There is an unsung immensity in the craft of Measuring Things Better. Within our sparkling cleverness for developing better and better...

In 1955, the World Health Organization had what, on the surface, seemed a splendid idea: Let’s Get Rid of Malaria. Just four years...

It might be difficult to believe if you were born within the last three decades, but there was once a time when America was led by a...

Polio, unique among humanity’s eradicated diseases, carries with it a visual familiarity that has insistently lingered far beyond its...

The first astronaut class to include women candidates, announced in 1978 and self-dubbed the TFNG, or Thirty-Five New Guys, brought six...

There is a bit of political wisdom we have lived with for half a century now, which says that spending money on space travel, while...

Pandemics. Having raised their heads every century or so to spread primal panic and horror on a continental scale, they were something we...

Her mother was raised in a brothel, and her son was Ronald Reagan. Take any section of Dr Margaret Chung’s (1889–1959) life, and lay it...

At 9 years old, a girl named Yamuna Joshee was married to her tutor, a man twenty years her senior, who thereupon changed her first name...

Generally, our experience of a particular medicine is as a great faceless thing the name of which we do not know until we desperately...

Prior to the eighteenth century, the answer to the question, ‘Who was allowed to practise medicine?’ was relatively simple: just about...

In 1912, it was against the law in the United States to publish a book that contained descriptions of birth control methods. It was...

As we have seen, the nineteenth century boasts a rich roster of medical women, any one of whom is the stuff of heroes: the trailblazing...