Health & Medicine through Time

Attitudes to sickness and health have played a key role across different civilisations and throughout time. The emphasis placed by the ancient societies of Egypt and Greece on the human body are discussed under this theme and the impact those beliefs had on society as it developed. Changes in welfare and hygiene are explored as are attitudes to cleanliness and the eradication of disease. The radical changes to the understanding, experimentation and application of medicine from the nineteenth century to today are an important part of this theme and are explored here.

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  • The right to fight: women’s boxing in Britain

    Article

    In this article Matthew Taylor explores the history of women’s boxing in Britain from the early eighteenth century onwards, showing how prevailing gender norms have led to this activity being marginalised by historians. It is argued that the key women boxers he discusses should be celebrated as key figures, not just in the history of sport but...

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  • White City: the world’s first Olympic Stadium

    Article

    The modern Olympic Games were first held in 1896, but it was not until their fourth edition, held in London 1908, that they had a purpose-built stadium as their sporting and ceremonial heart. This article by Martin Polley explores the history of that stadium – White City. As well as...

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  • Real Lives: Beatrice Alexander

    Article

    Our series ‘Real Lives’ seeks to put the story of the ordinary person into our great historical narrative. We are all part of the rich fabric of the communities in which we live and we are affected to greater and lesser degrees by the big events that happen on a daily...

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  • Vera Ignatievna Giedroyc: her missions of mercy, 1899–1932

    Article

    Historical research takes place in many forms and in many locations. This research, which has been translated for us, introduces us to an heroic pioneering Ukrainian woman surgeon. During the Spring of 1932 in the Ukrainian city of Kiev, on a sunny day in March, a very small group of...

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  • Real Lives: Anna Wessels Williams (1863–1954)

    Article

    Patrick J Pead writes about a truly remarkable woman whose contribution to advances in medicine deserves far wider recognition. Our series ‘Real Lives’ seeks to put the story of the ordinary person into our great historical narrative. We are all part of the rich fabric of the communities in which we live...

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  • Old age care in the time of crisis: London in the sixteenth century

    Article

    In her lecture to the General Strand of the HA Conference, Christine Fox describes the successes and failures of London institutions in dealing with the sixteenth-century crisis of poverty and elderly care. In late medieval and early modern thinking, human life was divided into three stages; youth, maturity, and old age. The latter...

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  • Out and About in South London

    Article

    In an unusual Out and About feature, the Young Historian Local History Senior Prize winner Flora Wilton Tregear shows us what her local area can tell us about the history of public health. Taking the DLR out from Lewisham you pass through Deptford Bridge station towards Greenwich. Here my father...

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  • The death of a hero: Vice-Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson

    Article

    Michael Crumplin comments on the injuries and illnesses that Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson suffered during his shortened career. His bold leadership style, much admired by his naval companions, inevitably led to a series of wounds. Using a combination of contemporary accounts and current clinical, anatomical and physiological interpretation, this article...

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  • Florence Nightingale and epidemics

    Article

    Richard Bates reveals how the expertise of Florence Nightingale is just as relevant now as it was in her own life-time. Late in 2020, the Merriam-Webster dictionary chose ‘pandemic’ as its word of the year, writing that, ‘it’s probably the word by which we’ll refer to this period [i.e. Covid-19...

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  • Real Lives: Commonwealth War Graves Commission memorial: Edward George Keeling

    Article

    Trevor James introduces a victim of an earlier pandemic. As we explore churchyards and appreciate the range of memorials that are revealed, they convey a variety of emotions and other messages. Sometimes they still contain quite unexpected surprises.  The single Commonwealth War Graves Commission memorial in the relatively remote rural Staffordshire village...

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  • The experience of Bilston in the cholera epidemic of 1831–32

    Article

    Alannah Tomkins introduces a well-chronicled early example of how a local community dealt with cholera. In September 1832 James Holmes, the governor of the workhouse at Bilston in Staffordshire wrote a letter to the salaried parish overseer of Uttoxeter. The initial impetus for the letter came from the two parishes’ shared interest...

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  • Disease and healthcare on the Isle of Man

    Article

    Caroline Smith provides a perspective, past and present, of the experiences of epidemics on the Isle of Man.  In recent times health has been at the forefront of everyone’s minds. Epidemics and pandemics are not new, but the Covid-19 outbreak is probably the first to have such a noticeable effect...

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  • Eyam: the plague village 1665-66

    Article

    Richard Stone explores the self-sacrifice of a Seventeenth Century village during an epidemic. History shows us these ‘unprecedented times’ are not that far from previous historical experiences. Lockdown, quarantine, self-isolation, ‘second wave’, ‘third wave’, airborne disease, churches closed; the Covid-19 experience resonates with the plight of the villagers of Eyam, three-and-a-half centuries...

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  • Glowing in the Dark

    Article

    The twentieth century celebrated many new technologies and just like many of those from the industrial revolution we now know them to be edged with danger and potential long-term damage. Here we learn about the effects that radium, bolstered by its advantages in war time, had on the civilian factory...

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  • The NHS: Britain’s National Health Service, 1948-2020

    Article

    The NHS: Britain’s National Health Service, 1948-2020, Susan Cohen, Shire Publications, 2020,64p, £8-99. ISBN 978-1-78442-482-4 For most of us in the United Kingdom, the National Health Service has been a constant feature for all of our lives. Susan Cohen offers us a brief summary of the development and achievements of...

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  • Black Death to global pandemic: London then and now

    Article

    Christine Merie Fox compares the impact of the Black Death on fourteenth-century London with our present-day experience. In 1347, a terrifying disease was carving a path from the East into Northern Africa and Europe. Its entry point into Europe was the south of Italy, via merchant ships from the Black Sea. The...

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  • Losing sight of the glory: five centuries of combat surgery

    Article

    Michael Crumplin traces developments in surgery that can be directly attributed to changes in the conduct of war. Little doubt exists that war accelerates and innovates medical care. Today, our armed services can rely upon sound medical treatment if they are sick or wounded, with survival rates of above 90%. This...

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  • Havelock Hall: the East India Company college gymnasium at Addiscombe

    Article

    Trevor James emphasises the importance of this structure in England’s sporting landscape. Tucked behind the houses in Havelock Road in the East Croydon suburb of Addiscombe is a seemingly unprepossessing building, known locally as ‘Havelock Hall’. Now converted into flats, it derives its name from its late nineteenth-century religious use,...

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  • English first-aid organisations and the Provisional IRA mainland bombing campaign of 1974

    Article

    Barry Doyle reveals how the devastating Provisional IRA bombing of two Birmingham public houses in 1974 led to a resurgence in first-aid training and preparation, on the scale with which we are familiar today.

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  • The development of the Department of Health

    Article

    Health as a specific feature of central government strategy is a relatively recent phenomenon and Hugh Gault identifies how this feature of everyday headlines in our newspapers has been managed until the present time. At the start of the twentieth  century Lord Salisbury’s Cabinet comprised four Secretaries of State –...

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