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

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 ...

What you’ll do. Join Claudia Hammond and a panel of guests from different areas of expertise to discuss the latest evidence on the relationship between water, climate change and health, inspired by ...

Licence: Public Domain Mark Credit: Turnbuch für Schulen als Anleitung für den Turnunterricht durch die Lehrer der Schulen / Von Adolf Spiess. Source: Wellcome Collection.

At the heart of this approach was the belief that foul air caused tuberculosis. Despite Robert Koch’s discovery of the TB germ, Mycobacterium tuberculosis in 1882, the foul-air theory continued to ...

Tobacco is a nightshade plant first introduced to Europe in the 16th century. The leaf had been widely used for centuries by the peoples of North and South America, where smoking formed an important ...

I n September 1950, during the first year of the Korean War, Edward Hunter, an American journalist who had worked in wartime intelligence, and post-war with the CIA, coined (or, more accurately, first ...

When a woman discloses that she’s autistic, the reaction is often, “But you don’t look autistic,” or even a straight denial, “No you’re not.” This insightful and moving series of portraits and ...

For centuries, doctors and philosophers have tried to visualise the essence of humanity. When we look into our bodies, we see blood, organs and bones, but what are we really made of? In this ...

In the 20th century, doctors and nurses became sex symbols and romantic heroes and heroines as medical Mills & Boon novels grew and spread with the newly created NHS. Agnes Arnold-Forster explores the ...

Beddoes publicly announced the discovery of an entirely “new pleasure” in nitrous oxide gas at the Pneumatic Institute. Beddoes, who had married Anna, the sister of novelist Maria Edgeworth in 1794, ...

According to the 15th-century doctrine of signatures, the medicinal use of a plant was indicated by how closely some part of it resembled a human body part or organ.The fact that the mandrake root ...