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.

Henry, Thomas Hetherington, approximately 1816-1859.

In the five centuries since Europeans were introduced to tobacco, smoking has generated considerable controversy. This gallery tracks shifting views on smoking and health, from life-saving stimulant ...

show credit information for image 'Geothermal hot spring landscape in Railroad Valley, Nevada, where a Canadian mining company is drilling a new hole in an effort to find large deposits of lithium.

How do you avoid catching the plague? Smoke constantly. Carry a sponge soaked in vinegar. Hang oranges studded with cloves around your house. This was the best medical advice available circa 1665, as ...

show credit information for image 'A covered corpse lying on a bed. Etching by Ch. Chaplin after Louis-Henri Deschamps.' When terrible winter storms lashed the East Coast of America in December 2022, ...

At the age of 22 I found myself in an airless, dreary and packed family court in India. My violent and abusive marriage was coming to an end. My husband couldn’t stand the fact that I was an ...

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 ...

Characters travel back in time to challenge sexologists Marie Stopes, Sigmund Freud, Hirschfield and Henry Havelock Ellis and their ideas, many of which continue to shape society’s thinking about sex ...

Michael W Young feels the effects on his body whenever he spends time in Manhattan. Though his research team is based in New York, at Rockefeller University, Young lives outside the city and is ...

My whole life had been marked by pain that I never had a name for. My family and I always thought that I just had a bit of a ‘weird body’. I experienced dislocations, subluxations, slipped disks, and ...

The cloud collar (云肩) has over 2,500 years of history in China. Yiling Zhang traces how having your head in the clouds went from cosmological symbol to fashion essential.