Discover all of the exhibitions, events and more on offer at Wellcome Collection, a free museum and library exploring health and human experience.

<p>Letters sent from Charles Darwin to his cousin Francis Galton. Dates from the time of the publication of Galton's Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa in 1853 up until Darwin's death ...

Thirst is a universal human experience shared with most living beings. With only 3% of the water on Earth being freshwater, our land thirsts too. 'Thirst: In Search of Freshwater' explores humanity’s ...

Anthony Acciavatti works at the intersection of landscape and the history of science and technology. He is the author of the award-winning 'Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River', ...

The architecture of purpose-built sanatoriums enabled doctors and nurses to monitor patients more closely – the transparent, open-air designs normalised a disciplinarian regime of surveillance, which ...

F or too many years there has been a persistent untruth that autism is rare in girls and women. The use of classic autistic male characteristics for diagnostic parameters has meant that generations of ...

Not everyone was happy with the growing use of tobacco in Britain. In 1604, King James VI wrote ‘A Counterblaste to Tobacco’, arguing that smoking was dangerous to lung health and offensive to the ...

M yalgic encephalomyelitis, known as ME, as well as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), is a doubly invisible illness. Not only are the symptoms hard to see, but the disease also attracts little ...

LGBTQ+ communities were the hardest hit by the epidemic, but they were also among the first to raise awareness and actively campaign for safer health and sexual practices. Among the early campaigners ...

The mandrake was connected with witchcraft as well, perhaps because of its use by female midwives and healers for fertility and childbirth. Jeanne d’Arc (d. 1431), for example, was accused at her ...

In 1950, an American journalist popularised the term ‘brainwashing’, arguing that a new amalgam of technology, medicine and ideology was allowing an onslaught on people’s minds. In this abridged ...

Eugenics gained acceptance among the intellectual, literary and political elites after the Second Boer War of 1902, in which Britain suffered enormous losses due to the poor physical condition of its ...