anatomy

The 20th-century movement to fix slouching questions the moral and political dimensions of addressing bad backs over wider public health concerns.

Meet the Washington artist who pioneered the field of medical illustration — and helped repair the lives of soldiers returning from WWI.

Whose body was harvested to create a spectacular anatomical specimen, and did that person know they would be on display more than a century later?

How the “obstetrical dilemma” and the dark history of pelvimetry met in the present.

Sturmann Yanghis, a 17-year-old South African, was put on stage in America as a “wild savage.” Harvard claimed his remains when he died. Then they disappeared.

The Smithsonian’s human brains collection was led by Ales Hrdlicka, a museum curator in the 1900s who believed that White people were superior.

Debating the meaning of gender is hardly new, but the clinical origin of the word may come as a surprise.

Medical schools in the antebellum U.S. were critical in the formation of a medical community that shared ideas about racial science.

Poe’s work reminds us that the separation of “Arts” and “Sciences” into discrete discourses of knowledge is itself a quite recent invention.

What we can learn from fifty years of anti-abortion propaganda.

Museums that harbor unethically obtained human remains are undergoing a reckoning. It’s about time.

How a bloody gun duel between two doctors in Transylvania sparked a frenzy of outrage—and helped create the American Medical Association.

In 1741, Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences held an essay contest searching for the origin of “blackness.” The results help us see how Enlightenment thinkers justified slavery.

Bodybuilding is routinely presented as the very apex of male heterosexuality—but its history is a bit gayer than you might think.

The two prevailing historical visions of Louis Agassiz — one gentle and reverential, the other rigid and bigoted — may simply be two sides of the same coin.

The wildly popular books helped people understand farming and health through the movement of the planets, in a way compatible with Protestantism.

It's worth considering how the two images of the beaver – one focused upon its hind parts and the other upon its industry – are but two acts in a single history.

Decades after Charles Knowlton died, his book would be credited with reversing population growth in England and the popularization of contraception in the U.S.

What did the signs and the phases of the moon mean to moon farmers in the 1840s?

In the 1780s, medical schools used cadavers stolen from the cemeteries of slaves.

On self-pleasure and sex education in children's literature.

Our ideas about sexuality and gender have changed before, and now they’re changing again.

Why we need to be critical of medical museums as spaces for disability histories.

Decade by decade, firearms have become deadlier—and tightened their grip on our collective imagination.

Smell’s diffuse nature requires crossing the boundaries of several subfields within the historical discipline, but also moving beyond the boundaries of history alone.

Biased ideas about a link between body size and health have led many people to dismiss unexpected scientific findings.

Morton and his skull measurements have long been part of the scholarship on American racism, but what happens when we draw Audubon into the racial drama?

Having a species named after you is an honor. Not everyone deserves it.

American fiction of the 19th century often featured a cruel doctor, whose unfeeling fascination with bodily suffering readers found unnerving.

Each generation revises his myth. Here’s the true story.