A 19th century madstone

Dubious Medicine on the Texas Frontier

If you got sick in the Texas frontier area in the decades before the Civil War, your options were all pretty bad.
A stethoscope

Second Opinions: On Intellectual Humility and Medicine

What happens when doctors admit they don't know everything?
An illustration of a woman distilling, 1691

The Home Science Labs of English Noblewomen

In the eighteenth century, elite women with a scientific bent often turned to distilling medicines, a craft that helped them participate in experimentation.
Stevia rebaudiana

Stevia’s Global Story

Native to Paraguay, Ka’a he’e followed a circuitous path through Indigenous medicine, Japanese food science, and American marketing to reach the US sweeteners market.
Hospital emergency room entrance sign

Medicalizing Domestic Violence

What happens when experts position domestic violence inside a biomedical model of care?
Cordyceps militaris

“There’s Gold in Them Thar Fungi”: Cordyceps as Cash Crop

A fungus in the genus Cordyceps has us running scared. But some of its species are worth more than their weight in gold.
A chemist examining a flask of urine

Early Doctors Diagnosed Disease by Looking at Urine

When uroscopy became trendy, it caused a minor scandal within the early medical profession.
A lichen in a paper coffee cup

Lichen Latte, Anyone?

Irrigation and antibiotics might be appropriate treatments for an animal bite—but maybe you’d prefer to sip a steaming lichen-and-pepper latte instead.
The interior of a Chinese pharmacy in Los Angeles, 1907

The Allure of Chinese Medicine 

Capitalizing on stereotypes earned Chinese-American practitioners patients, but it also helped keep them confined to the margins of American society.
Cretan rockrose

Plant of the Month: Cretan Rockrose

Cretan rockrose has been used as a medicine for millennia. Its unusual harvesting methods were documented by the ancient historian Herodotus.