Audre Lorde changed the way generations of feminists throughout the world think about intersectional identities, social justice, and the...

On the 29 June 1864, a military surgeon in the 21st Kentucky Infantry wrote to his wife. ‘It has been almost one continued stream of...

Tragedy struck Edith Cecil-Porch Maturin four times between 1900 and 1917. First, her twelve-year-old son died in 1900, followed five...

Sleep is necessary to life. However, it remains shrouded in mystery, despite the fact that most people spend one third of their lives...

In August 1812, eminent novelist Frances Burney described with alarming precision her mounting sense of terror as she prepared to undergo...

Pain is a phantom, a spectre that haunts clinical encounters. Physical suffering is the chief symptom impelling people to seek medical...

Cicero (106-43 B.C.): ‘Nature has given us eyes to declare our internal emotions’. Paulo Coelho (1947-): ‘The eyes are the mirror of the...

Punch divided the stomach into four ‘Faculties’. It called the first the ‘Sustaining Faculty’, which dealt with foods that were essential...

In June 2015, Rachel Dolezal was exposed for having lied about being of African American heritage. Dolezal was head of her local branch...

The foot. Where will feet take us today? In the middle of a pandemic [I first wrote this blog during lock-down!], most of us will be...

This blog comes with a warning: it is not for those delicate of hearing or squeamish of stomach because today I am writing about two sex...

On 21 June 1986, nine American women removed their shirts in a park in Rochester, New York. They were protesting against a law which...

In September 1971, Ebony magazine published an article that broke a major taboo: a survivor of breast cancer wrote candidly about her...

Between 25 and 40 million people worldwide have died as a result of opportunistic infections arising from AIDS or Acquired...

What does tuberculosis look like? If we are thinking about the early-nineteenth century, we might imagine an emaciated, white, male...

In April 1973, cinemas throughout America began screening a tearjerking love story, the plot of which revolved around sickle cell...

The Great Cat Massacre in New York City began in July 1916. By the end of that month, 72,000 cats and around 8,000 dogs had been...

A few weeks before writing this blog, I was launching a book that I had recently published. A former PhD student of mine and someone I...

To whom does a woman’s body belong? In mid-nineteenth century Britain, this question provoked impassioned debates between moralists,...

Is sex a ‘good thing’? Is celibacy dangerous? How can we understand the explosive violence of Incels, those young men (primarily) whose...