Our new exhibition explores experiences and perceptions of ageing, from adolescence to older age, and asks how societies can adapt to ensure everyone ages better.

Fashionable seaside towns in England owe much of their popularity to the 18th-century doctors who advised their patients to take the ‘sea cure’. How did the so-called ‘sea cure’ supplant the taking of ...

Search for images about health and human experience. Our collections include paintings, photographs, engravings, etchings, illustrations and more.

This material is part of the Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale collection. The original may be consulted at University of California Libraries. "The following notes are by no means intended as a rule of ...

Records of private asylums have had an extremely poor survival rate compared with those in the public sector, which have had the benefits of statutory protection and a greater measure of continuity.

The costume of Great Britain / Designed, engraved, and written by W.H. Pyne.

A skeleton in the pose of the Venus de' Medici. Pen and ink drawing.

A woman being tortured by being strapped naked onto a horse and dragged through a town. Wood engraving after G. Durand.

We think of assistive technology as something modern, and that people with mobility issues in the past were limited to their locality or confined within their homes. But there are clues in the ...

In 1950, an American journalist popularised the term ‘brainwashing’, arguing that a new amalgam of technology, medicine and ideology was allowing an onslaught on people’s minds. In this abridged ...

To date, little has been revealed about what happened when LGBTQI people – especially women – encountered the mental health system 50 years ago. But new research is unearthing hidden, and often ...

Prison officers tried to regulate women’s minds and bodies, and maintain a new disciplinary routine in the second half of the 1800s. Many female inmates resisted. In July 1859, the Superintendent of ...