Inside our collections

Today many of us learn about fertility, conception and pregnancy online. But that wasn’t always the way. Discover how masks and rituals played an important educational role.

Isolated housewives, lonely female office workers: while the 1950s saw the birth of a general concern about them, manufacturers also spotted an opportunity. Find out how advertising promised that products could salve solitude.

Find out how a sweet-smelling liquid anaesthetic captured the public’s imagination and changed pop culture for ever.

Are you ill or are you simply in love? It can be hard to tell. No wonder lovesickness was for centuries regarded as a bona fide disease.

Extreme fasting has captured the public imagination for centuries. What pushes people to claim to go without food for improbable lengths of time?

Sometimes we literally get sick of our jobs. Discover how researchers and medics throughout history have made connections between our work and our wellbeing.

In 1583, eye specialist Georg Bartisch published a book detailing the treatments he’d developed for various eye disorders. Today his approach seems to mix surprising innovation with entirely contemporary religious judgement.

Through its long history, London has survived some enormous epidemics. During the 1665 Great Plague of London, the city burned, shops closed, the streets emptied and bodies piled up. Read Samuel Pepys’s account of how the city pulled through.

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

During the current pandemic, billions of people around the world are confined to home, making mood-boosting daily exercise indispensable. Discover how humans from the ancient Greeks onwards have realised the benefits of physical activity.

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

From ancient sources of spiritual sustenance to the modern spa, Ross MacFarlane traces a brief history of healing waters.

Read the fascinating story behind the rare manual that helped volunteers on one of Britain’s first free telephone helplines to deal with masturbating callers.

Find out how arsenic has been used for good and ill, to cure and kill, for centuries.

As meat trading in the area ends, Tom Bolton looks at the history of London’s Smithfield, which has been a place of healing and death, markets and mess for 900 years.

Getting creatively romantic due to a virus sounds all too contemporary, but our archives show what socially distanced seduction looked like seven decades ago.

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

From douches to diaphragms, and condoms to caps, discover the wide range of contraception methods people have used over the centuries.