Medicine

When the local wizard was the repository of all wisdom

11 May 2024 9:00 am

Before the arrival of ‘proper’ doctors, everyone in the Middle Ages, from rulers to peasants, turned to magic practitioners and cunning folk for healing and advice

I want to see a doctor – not do another NHS survey

13 April 2024 9:00 am

Nye Bevan did not make old bones, and perhaps that’s just as well. According to a recent British Social Attitudes…

Adrift on the Canadian frontier: The Voyageur, by Paul Carlucci, reviewed

13 April 2024 9:00 am

Based on the 19th-century ‘voyageur’ Alexis de Martin, Carlucci’s young protagonist is befriended by kindly strangers. But what are their true motives?

How much would your family stump up for your ransom?

16 March 2024 9:00 am

Researching The Price of Life, Jenny Kleeman interviews Stephen Collet, who describes haggling for a year with the Somali pirates who kidnapped his sister in October 2009

Not everything in the garden is lovely

4 November 2023 9:00 am

For as long as we have been human, powerful chemicals in plants have provided us with stimulants, analgesics – and the means of murder

Are surgical museums such the Hunterian doomed?

27 May 2023 9:00 am

Margaret Mitchell on the ethics of museums of anatomical specimens

The deathly malaise that’s crippling Russia

8 October 2022 9:00 am

Now is a difficult time to empathise with Russians – which is why we need Maxim Osipov. We need him…

How the ancients treated gout

27 August 2022 9:00 am

Medical problems come and go in the media, and at the moment the flavour of the month appears to be…

How we fell for antidepressants

21 August 2022 4:00 pm

The French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, with his accustomed acuity about modern culture, titled his last novel but one Serotonin. By…

The danger of learning too much from Covid

21 May 2022 9:00 am

When Ray Bradbury was asked if his dystopian vision in Fahrenheit 451 would become a reality, he replied: ‘I don’t…

The treatment of mental illness continues to be a scandal

21 May 2022 9:00 am

There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished…

TB is back with a vengeance

5 March 2022 9:00 am

If you were a teenager before 2005, one reminder of tuberculosis in British life is that small circular scar on…

Eugenics will never work — thankfully

5 February 2022 9:00 am

The creation of a master race is an ancient idea which, thankfully, can never work, says Sam Leith

Why has medicine been so slow to improve over the centuries?

27 November 2021 9:00 am

Medicine was founded by Hippocrates in the 5th century BC. Doctors continued to study the Hippocratic texts into the 19th…

Why cocktails are superior to wine

14 August 2021 9:00 am

I often argue that, in theory at least, well-made cocktails are indisputably better than wines costing 20 times more. My…

What did the Romans ever do for us?

17 July 2021 9:00 am

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is planning to install a statue of John Chilembwe in Trafalgar Square. Mr Chilembwe…

How the Lancet lost our trust

26 June 2021 9:00 am

How the Lancet lost our trust

The hidden death toll of lockdown

10 April 2021 9:00 am

The last patient I treated was 105 years old. She has lived through two world wars, a depression and at…

In an age of science, why are face masks a matter of opinion?

25 July 2020 9:00 am

In 1846 Vienna, as across much of the world, a relatively new disease called puerperal (or ‘childbed’) fever had reached…

The truth behind 'do not resuscitate' orders

4 April 2020 5:34 am

Coronavirus is revealing many good things about our society: the number of people willing to volunteer to help tackle the outbreak…

On the NHS front line, we’re braced for what’s coming

28 March 2020 9:00 am

The fight against coronavirus has only just begun

Do Jews think differently?

5 October 2019 9:00 am

Sixteen years into a stop-go production saga, I got a call from the director of The Song of Names with…

The snake-oil salesmen who prey on schizophrenics

22 June 2019 9:00 am

Schizophrenia is the psychiatric illness about which the most misconceptions abound. It’s not so much the ‘negative’ symptoms that cause…

David Cameron campaigning on the day before the June 2016 referendum (Getty)

Letters: Of course Brexit is David Cameron’s fault

13 April 2019 9:00 am

All Cameron’s fault Sir: In this time of febrile political speculation, there can have been few more arresting subject headings…

Arthritis, nerve pain and chronic fatigue: my life with Lyme disease

9 February 2019 9:00 am

Some medical experts claim that Lyme disease is worse than cancer. It’s not a competition, but I do know one…