Cambodian New Year's celebration, Trairatanaram Temple, Lowell, Massachusetts, 1988

Tapping Cultural Values Against Domestic Violence

Southeast Asian Americans navigated evolving cultural norms while building grassroots organizations to combat violence against women.
Legionella pneumonia

Legionnaires’ Disease, an Illness of Affluence

Legionnaires’ is the first communicable disease of modern wealth, thriving in the interstitial spaces of our built environment.
Native American midwives weighing a crying Native Amerian child on a set of scales in the hospital at the Glacier National Park, in northwestern Montana, on the Canada–United States border, circa 1945

Call the Midwives—Assuming Any Are Left

While midwife-attended deliveries are the norm in the United Kingdom, they’re the exception in the United States. Time was, this difference wasn’t so stark.
Orpheus by George de Forest Brush, 1890

Francis Bacon’s Fables of Life Extension

In his retellings of ancient myths, Bacon called for research to extend human lifespans, but only if those longer lives were spent in the pursuit of knowledge.
Close-up of a raccoon

Raccoons in the Laboratory

The lab rat is now a symbol of science, but psychologists once believed that raccoons presented unique potential in the study of animal intelligence.
Andrea Prader, c. 1977

Defining and Redefining Intersex

The transatlantic circulation of ideas between Baltimore and Zurich consolidated and standardized treatments of intersex infants in the 1950s.
Rosalind Franklin with microscope in 1955

Rosalind Franklin’s Methods of Discovery

Franklin’s strategy for analyzing images of DNA molecules forces us to reconsider our definition of “scientific discovery,” argues Michelle G. Gibbons.
DSM-5

What’s a Mental Health Diagnosis For?

Following the publication of the DSM-5, mental health professionals debated the expansion of “mental illness” to include normal parts of the human condition.
Relief from a wall of the northern palace of Nineveh, Iraq. 645-635 BC

Haunted Soldiers in Mesopotamia

In ancient Mesopotamia, many medical disorders were attributed to ghosts, including mental problems faced by men who had spent years at war.
The exterior of the concept design home "Reversible Destiny Lofts MITAKA: In Memory of Helen Keller" is seen on October 27, 2005 in Tokyo, Japan.

Arakawa and Gins: An Eternal Architecture

With the Reversible Destiny Foundation, architect-philosophers Arakawa and Gins created disquieting designs meant to defeat mortality.