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Medicine

Essays and videos exploring physics, evolution, cosmology and other frontiers in science

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Illustration of three people, one with wide eyes and mouth open, another holding their head, third timing with a pocket watch.

videoMedicine

Drinking wine from toxic cups was the 17th century’s own dubious ‘detox’ treatment

11 minutes

A hospital room with a patient in a gown and headscarf speaking to a doctor, while a man stands nearby taking notes.

essayIllness and disease

The power of the ‘C’ word

Saying the word ‘cancer’ changes a person’s life and can lead to overtreatment and fear. Is the word too hot to use at all?

Benjamin Chin-Yee

essayHistory of science

A nasogenital tale

A bizarre theory (and a gory surgery) in fin-de-siècle Vienna help us get a grip on how science and medicine actually work

Urte Laukaityte

Engraving of a classroom with children sewing, some highlighted in red, teachers stand at the front with windows above.

videoIllness and disease

Humanity eradicated smallpox 45 years ago. It’s a story worth remembering

25 minutes

A silhouetted figure sitting on a chair behind frosted glass partitions in a waiting room with overhead lights.

essayIllness and disease

Permission to be ill

It took months for my functional neurological disorder to finally be diagnosed. It’s a condition that must be recognised

Kevin Aho

Dried ground leaves being poured from a scoop into a container indoors.

essayAddiction

The kratom question

Millions are turning to an unregulated herbal extract to curb their opioid addiction. But do the risks outweigh the benefits?

Xi Chen

Photo of two surgeons in blue scrubs and masks focused on a procedure, with one surgeon’s glasses reflecting the surgery.

essayMedicine

When I lost my intuition

For years, I practised medicine with cool certainty, comfortable with life-and-death decisions. Then, one day, I couldn’t

Ronald W Dworkin

Aerial photo of a winding river through lush green rainforest with dramatic cloud formations in the sky above.

essayPublic health

Hearts and brains

Humans always end up with clogged arteries, right? That’s not what the lives of the Tsimane in the Amazon basin tell us

Ben Daitz

A masked nurse in scrubs sitting in a hospital waiting area.

essayBioethics

Moral resilience

Nurses experience deep suffering when they can’t act according to their moral compass. Our research shows a way forward

Cynda Hylton Rushton

Vintage advertising poster for ‘Cocaine Toothache Drops’ featuring two children playing happily, building a house from sticks, in front of a house with a wooden fence.

essaySubcultures

An undulating thrill

Once lauded as a wonder of the age, cocaine soon became the object of profound anxieties. What happened?

Douglas Small

Silhouette of a man, a child, and a cow with large horns sitting on the ground at sunset.

essayProgress and modernity

In praise of magical thinking

Once we all had knowledge of how to heal ourselves using plants and animals. The future would be sweeter for renewing it

Anna Badkhen

Image of a human colon highlighted in blue, with a contrasting yellow-orange background, taken using a medical imaging technique to show the internal structure.

essayIllness and disease

Getting past ‘it’s IBS’

While science illuminates the gut-brain relationship, doctors remain ignorant and dismissive of patients with gut problems

Xi Chen

A team of surgeons in blue scrubs and surgical caps operate under bright surgical lights in an operating theatre. Medical instruments and equipment are arranged on tables around them, while one team member adjusts another’s mask. Shelves in the background hold medical supplies.

essayMedicine

Last hours of an organ donor

In the liminal time when the brain is dead but organs are kept alive, there is an urgent tenderness to medical care

Ronald W Dworkin

A patient plays the violin while undergoing brain surgery, surrounded by surgeons and medical staff wearing scrubs and masks in an operating theatre.

essayNeuroscience

Rethinking the homunculus

When we discovered that the brain contained a map of the body it revolutionised neuroscience. But it’s time for an update

Moheb Costandi

Cartoon man with white hair and moustache smiling while holding pliers and a bloody tooth inside a candlelit building, against a snowy village background.

videoMedicine

Why surgery and barbering were one occupation in the Middle Ages

6 minutes

A black and white photo of a man in doctor’s clothing posed next to a lab bench with a microscope looking directly at the camera

essayMedicine

Physician, invade thyself

Eager for medical breakthroughs, some doctors take enormous risks experimenting on themselves. Should we celebrate them?

Tom Doyle

Art deco-style illustration of a person holding a flaming torch and a sword, with text “DON’T FIGHT CANCER ALONE” above on a blue and white background.

essayIllness and disease

The war on cancer

Is it time to abandon the century-old idea that cancer is best met with a ‘fight’ from patients and their doctors alike?

Elaine Schattner

Paramedic loading a stretcher into an ambulance at night with lighted buildings in the background.

videoMedicine

What is it like to be a paramedic, navigating human emergency?

17 minutes

Silhouette of a person peering through blinds in a dimly lit room, with a pet carrier on the bed below.

essayIllness and disease

Are they the canaries?

People with multiple chemical sensitivity seem to be allergic to the world. What, if anything, can medicine do for them?

Xi Chen

Hospital bed with colourful curtain background, white pillow, overhead patient lift, and hand control.

essayMedicine

The body is not a machine

Modern biomedicine sees the body as a closed mechanistic system. But illness shows us to be permeable, ecological beings

Nitin K Ahuja

Black-and-white photo of a person lying on a bed, restrained by two others while having electroshock therapy.

essayHistory of science

Shocked

With evidence for efficacy so thin, and the stakes so high, why is ‘electroshock’ therapy still a mainstay of psychiatry?

John Read

A white root vegetable with multiple long tendrils lies on a cobblestone surface.

essayIllness and disease

Natural and unnatural

‘Natural’ remedies are metaphysically inconsistent and unscientific. Yet they offer something that modern medicine cannot

Alan Jay Levinovitz

A green cactus with twisted stems and spines in a gravelly garden, with blurry plants and trees in the background.

essayIllness and disease

Beautiful monsters

Cancer is part of multicellular life. Now the riotous growth of crested cacti show how humans might adapt to live with it

Athena Aktipis

Black and-white-photo of a nurse operating a 1940s respirator machine while a young boy lies in bed wearing a chest respirator.

essayMedicine

Life and breath

There’s a strange, and deeply human, story behind how we taught machines to breathe for critically ill patients

Sarah Ruth Bates