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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...

In the seventeenth century, smallpox ravaged Europe with a persistent ferocity beyond reckoning. At its height, it killed 400,000...

How deep can hopelessness go? Is there a lower limit, a solid floor against which we can push and thrust ourselves back into some...

She had founded first England’s and then Scotland’s first medical school for women, and been instrumental in the passing of the Medical...