Heritage things:

This year's English Heritage blue plaques to include the 1888 Matchgirls' Strike, the Ayahs' Home in Hackney, and a pioneer of humane psychiatric care, Dr John Conolly and the Hanwell Asylum.

Campaigners are celebrating a victory in the battle for public access to the countryside, after the government agreed to cancel a deadline to ( Read more... )

At people going about a pandemic disease that they find personally inconvenient 'got to live with it'.

As if 'living with it' is just about shrugging your shoulders and letting the dice fall as they may.

Am surprised at no reports of rumbling in the cemeteries where Victorian sanitarians are buried.

Because when you are dealing with a disease like ( Read more... )

There's a story about the origins of the song in the 1964 Mary Poppins movie, 'A Spoonful of Sugar' by the son of one of the Sherman brothers, that they were trying to come up with the song, and he came in from having his polio vaccine on a lump of sugar, and, BINGO! there was their song.

Okay, they changed it to spoonful....

The concept of ' ( Read more... )

Ministers pledge to ‘reset the dial’ on women’s health in England: After 100,000 women voiced concerns, plans include menopause support, GP training and banning ‘virginity repair’ operations. On Wednesday night, ministers pledged to introduce legislation criminalising hymenoplasty or any procedure to rebuild or repair the hymen. Such surgery ( Read more... )

And given the present circumstance, I'm going with a very long and still unconcluded war, in fact, one that is only in certain of its phases a matter of remembrance rather than a present matter.
The War Against Disease.
Thomas Nashe, In Time of Pestilence: ADIEU, farewell earth's bliss!
This world uncertain is:
Fond are life's lustful joys,
Death ( Read more... )

Okay, this was one sentence in an otherwise what appeared to be excellent interview with neurologist doing good work on migraine.
But, honestly? 'Two hundred years ago... people with epilepsy would have been burned at the stake as witches'
Quite apart from the false assumption that in England witches were ever burnt, two hundred years ago makes it ( Read more... )

And people actually sign on for it.
Intimate data: can a person who tracks their steps, sleep and food ever truly be free?: 'Big tech now encourages us to monitor everything from our heart rate to our glucose levels via smartphones and watches. How much privacy have we lost to the promise of self improvement - and is it time to stop?'
How about we ( Read more... )

Or at least, a couple of centuries.
Spent a chunk of this afternoon virtually attending a webinar (actually I suppose one can only attend webinars virtually) on the history of vasectomy in the UK in the later decades of the C20th.
(I hav knowingz and it was actually being practised in the 30s but really only if you knew the name of the right bloke ( Read more... )

Maybe it is because I am An Old, and maybe there is a phenomenon whereby women as figures in history are more liable than men to drop out of the narrative and have to be rediscovered at periodic intervals, unless they are, um, - Florence Nightingale? the Pankhursts (but didn't I see somebody claiming Sylvia, the most biographised of the family, as ( Read more... )

I daresay there are those among my dr rdrz who make bread who are well acquainted with Allinson's flours, or even if they don't bake their own, with Allinson's Bread. The brainchild of Thomas R Allinson, passionate advocate of wholemeal bread long before it became A Thing.

However, that bio on the Allinson website rather sanitises the story, I feel ( Read more... )