Medicine and health

The effects of the disease known as the Black Death

Black Death quarantine: how did we try to contain the most deadly disease in history?

Henry VIII

Q&A What was the Sweating Sickness? And how did Henry VIII ‘self-isolate’?

Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet

Jane Austen’s tips for “health and happiness”

Photo of flu patients during the First World War

First World War

Q&A Why was the 1918-19 pandemic known as Spanish Flu?

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Illustration of Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19). (Photo by Alamy)

Coronavirus: a historical perspective . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Immigrant children are examined by a city health officer upon arrival at the battery from Ellis Island during a Typhus scare, c1911. (Image by Bettmann/Getty Images)

A short history of quarantine

Wartime evacuees wash their hands

“The very sight of her hands did almost turn my stomach”: a brief history of hand-washing

Did medieval people take baths? This 15th-century illustration would suggest so – and shows a man climbing out of a tub. Medieval doctors prescribed bathing as a cure for conditions ranging from bladder stones to melancholy. (Photo by Bridgeman)

The (not so) stinky Middle Ages: why medieval people were cleaner than we think

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Doctor treating a patient, from a 14th-century manuscript. (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

Medieval medicine . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

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A medieval monk praying in front of a table of apothacary's herbs

Beating the Black Death: did medieval medicine help people to survive? . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Midwives and babies in the sun

Midwifery and childbirth: a historical A–Z guide

On 20 July 1969, Lunar Module 'Eagle' touched down gently on the Sea of Tranquility on the moon. (Photo by NASA/Newsmakers via Getty Images)

From ‘moon-germs’ to motion sickness: health and safety on NASA’s 1969 lunar landing mission

Now a protected species in many countries, the hedgehog was once also a health food. A German cookbook dating from the mid-15th century recommends the meat of a hedgehog as useful for leprosy and urinary retention. (Photo by Yuri SmityukTASS via Getty Images)

Hedgehogs, cannabis bread and horse placenta: 13 weird and wonderful health foods in history

US soldiers in Vietnam

From the Napoleonic Wars to Vietnam and Iraq: a history of war trauma

Medieval trepanning

General prehistory

Q&A What is trepanning?