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Football player on the ground, grabbing his head in pain.
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‘Another Player Down’

How concern about injuries is changing sports.
Madame Restell

‘Hag of Misery’

The abortionist Madame Restell is central to the story of how American women’s reproductive freedom was dismantled in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Dorothy Roberts.

A Damning Exposé of Medical Racism and “Child Welfare”

A new book exposes effects of anti-Black myth-making and calls for an end to the family policing system.
Painting of the english surgeon Edward Jenner inoculating a child.

How Far Back Were Africans Inoculating Against Smallpox? Really Far Back.

When I looked at the archives, I found a history hidden in plain sight.
Front entrance of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Mütter and More

Why we need to be critical of medical museums as spaces for disability histories.
Ozempic injection and box
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For 150 Years, We’ve Sought a Scientific Solution To Cure Addiction

A miracle cure for addiction may not be around the corner.
Convalescing Civil War soldiers with crutches
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The Post-Civil War Opioid Crisis

Many servicemen became addicted to opioids prescribed during the war. Society viewed their dependency as a lack of manliness.
Discolored painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Here Are 10 Shockingly Radical Things the Founding Fathers Said

The Founding Fathers made startlingly progressive statements that didn’t make it into popular history.
The sixty-four hexagrams from the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.
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The I Ching in America

Europeans translated the "Chinese Book of Changes" in the nineteenth century, but the philosophy really took off in the West after 1924.
Botanical drawing of a flowering pennyroyal plant.

Pennyroyal, Mifepristone, and the Long History of Medication Abortions

Pennyroyal is a species of mint with purple flowers. It smells like spearmint. And it has been used as an abortifacient for over two thousand years.
Demonstrators with signs supporting medication abortion.

Conservatives Are Turning to a 150-Year-Old Obscenity Law to Outlaw Abortion

With the Comstock Act of 1873 coming back to life, reproductive care, LGBTQ protections, and a host of other civil rights are now at risk.
Newspaper headline reading: "Red Cross Says Refusal of Negro Blood is U.S. Order."

Good Blood, Bad Policy: The Red Cross and Jim Crow

A 1940s Red Cross rule, which racially segregated blood, propped up notions of racial difference and Black inferiority.
Photo of a young Chinese worker carrying tea.

Inside the Diet That Fueled Chinese Transcontinental Railroad Workers

Denied the free meals of their Irish counterparts, Chinese laborers learned to thrive on their own.
Oil painting by Claire Lehmann called "Painter’s Hand, Patron’s Hand."

Learning and Not Learning Abortion

The fact that most doctors like me don't know how to perform abortions is one of the greatest scandals of contemporary medicine in the US.
Cartoon of Madame Restell and Mrs. Bird accompanied by a skeleton.

Female Physicians in Antebellum New York City

"Female physicians" did a lot more than provide abortions, but abortion soon encompassed how others perceived their work.
Three men standing along a store sign outside of a drug store, listing the available drugs and tonics for treatment.

The Tragic Case of Poisoning That Finally Got Us Safe Drugs

The elixir had antifreeze, for flavor. Nobody blinked—at first.
An advertisement for Bayer aspirin and heroin.

Treating the (Last) Pandemic

Heroin, Aspirin, and The Spanish Flu.
A room full of empty hospital beds.

Modern Medicine Has Improved Our Lives, But What About Our Deaths?

Anthropologists study the hormones in hair to compare the stress levels of people nearing death today with those who died 100 years ago.
An 1878 trademark registration for Miasmine, an ineffective anti-malaria medicine. (Library of Congress)

In the 1880s, D.C.’s Doctors Argued About Malaria and Its Cause

Malaria — literally, if not scientifically, "bad air" — once claimed Washingtonians by the score. So why did some doctors believe it wasn't real?
Old botanical book open to a page titled "Cotton Wood," with a color plate of cottonwood leaves.
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Plant of the Month: Poplar

Poplar—ubiquitous in timber, landscape design, and Indigenous medicines—holds new promise in recuperating damaged ecosystems.
Illustration of Benjamin Franklin overlaid on textbook excerpt

Ben Franklin Put an Abortion Recipe in His Math Textbook

To colonial Americans, termination was as normal as the ABCs and 123s.
African-American man holding a medical bag, posing behind horse-drawn carriage.

Doctors Without Borders

On the Black doctors who received their medical degrees and a new sort of freedom in Europe.
A cemetery with a dusting of snow.

Safer Than Childbirth

Abortion in the 19th century was widely accepted as a means of avoiding the risks of pregnancy.
Bleachman, a mascot created by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation as a part of a campaign directed at drug users and intended to help slow the transmission of HIV in needle-using communities, 1988.

What We Can Learn From Harm Reduction’s Defeats

The history of the movement is one of unlikely success. But what can we learn from embattled experiments like prescribed heroin? 
Vintage drawing of a Victorian-era drugstore

Was Edgar Allan Poe a Habitual Opium User?

While Poe was likely using opium, the efforts to keep him quiet suggest that he was also drinking.
A milk maid shows her cowpoxed hand to a physician, while a farmer or surgeon offers to a young man inoculation with cowpox that he has taken from a cow.

Whack-a-Mole

Vaccine skepticism and misinformation have persisted since the smallpox epidemics. With the internet, it's only gotten worse.
Abortion protestors kneeling by pro-abortion signs.
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Failing to Embed Abortion Care in Mainstream Medicine Made It Politically Vulnerable

Actions by the medical profession in the 1970s still reverberate today.
A protest from an anti-vaccination protest

The COVID Anti-Vax Movement Has History on Its Side

Today’s “medical freedom” warriors are drawing on a centuries-old American tradition.
Ben Franklin portrait

'I Long Regretted Bitterly, and Still Regret That I Had Not Given It To Him'

Benjamin Franklin's writing about losing his son to smallpox is a must-read for parents weighing COVID-19 vaccines today.
A protestor wearing syringes, protesting the vaccine mandate
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Doubters’ Push for Religious Exemptions from Coronavirus Vaccination May Not Work

With all organized religions supporting vaccination, states may question the sincerity of those claiming exemptions from getting vaccinated.

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