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Imagine a device that can treat everything from baldness to gout. Too good to be true? Yes, and it was banned – but not before hundreds were hoodwinked.

What use is ‘twitching’? Exploring materials created over 500 years shows that there’s more to birdwatching than meets the eye.

The NHS might only be 70 years old, but the idea of free healthcare goes back to Ancient Greece, when devout doctors provided their services without charge.

Gloucester, 1896. Ethel Cromwell is taken ill at the height of Britain’s last great smallpox epidemic.

New Orleans, 1853. James McGuigan arrives in the port city and succumbs to yellow fever.

It’s been over 400 years since a Swiss alchemist theorised that foetuses could develop outside the womb. Claire Horn examines incubator technology past and present, and explores the possibilities recent prototypes might bring.

New York, 1907. Mary Mallon spreads infection, unaware that her name will one day become synonymous with typhoid.

We look back at the importance of the head, from how it’s influenced our language to the bold political statement of having it removed.

Historian Emily Mayhew has met soldiers who have survived the seemingly unsurvivable. Here, she explores the part prosthetics play in the process of military rehabilitation.

How our understanding of electricity has grown, from novelty to the pulse of modern life – and the inner fire that powers the human machine.

In the 1950s, dramatic political battles over NHS charges brought down a government. But public confidence in the service still grew.

There are around 15 iron corsets in museum collections around the world, including two in Wellcome Collection. Historians still dispute their purpose, but these intriguing objects hold clues about who would have worn them and why.

Historian Emma J Wells examines at how medieval European churches sought to keep their parishioners healthy.

Some games carry a weighty message, from the earliest form of snakes and ladders that led to either heaven or hell, to chess pieces representing the dangerous manoeuvres of unsafe sex in the 80s.

Find out what kinds of treatment history offered to people suffering from voice problems.

The rapid, short-lived high we get from whippets, reefers and vapes can be accompanied by long-term health consequences. The search is on for safer ways to get stoned.

The high cost of fashion is not always in the price tag. Sometimes the latest make-up trend or the season's hottest colour conceals something ugly.

Votive offerings, known as ex-votos, have been a vibrant part of devotional practice since ancient times and, Louisa McKenzie suggests, they still have a place in the secular world of today.

Odd diets aren’t just for January. Here are some examples that go back way further than New Year’s Day.

For centuries, women have been ridiculed and punished for excessive talking, despite the fact that men gossip just as much.