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Lavinia Waterhouse (1809–1890) lived at the intersection of a tangle of ideas that, to the twenty-first-century mind, have no business...

Seventy miles west of Denver, in a small town nestled 8,574 feet above sea level there rests the town of Fraser. Today an enclave of...

It is the early 1870s and we are heading into the mining town of Gornyi Zerentui, located in the mountainous Transbaikal region on the...

Imagine it is the twelfth century, and you have woken up experiencing some trouble breathing. Fortunately, you have the financial...

In September of 1960, the American pharmaceutical company Richardson-Merrell submitted their application to the FDA for the approval of...

For women in science, posterity has three fates in store. Some, like Marie Curie or Rosalyn Yalow, are recognised in their time and...

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 (1821–1910), 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...