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Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library that aims to challenge how we all think and feel about health. Our online content aims to create opportunities for people to make connections between science, medicine, life and art. We want to spark conversation, inspire debate and encourage you to share your personal perspectives on human health and experience. But don’t be rude, hateful or insult
Artist Serena Korda's work explores how women's bodies are seen as they age - and imagines a world where they're seen differently.
The Coming of Age is free and open now at Wellcome Collection: https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/the-coming-of-age
Alt text: This reel shows Serena at work in her studio making the clay sculptures that form her installation Wild Apples.
Footage courtesy of Jesse Roth .
‘Tenderness and Rage’ explores HIV and AIDS through stories of protest and care, from the height of the UK’s AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s to global experiences of HIV today.
Through photography, film and archival materials, the display connects everyday acts of care with activists’ fights for dignity, rights and equitable access to treatment. At its heart are two photographic series created by .
‘Tenderness and Rage’ is free and open now at Wellcome Collection.
19/05/2026
Sometimes the past can feel like a distant place. But the real moments commemorated in these paintings - a parent protecting their child, or praying over their sickbed - make it feel as close as can be. Votive paintings are made to give thanks to God for protection from harm or recovery from illness. They're often inscribed with the letters PGR: "Per Grazia Ricevuta", or "For Grace Received").
Alt text: The slides here show a number of votive oil paintings, largely dating from the 19th century. The first shows a woman shielding her child as a man attacks her in a bedroom; the others show various scenes of families sitting by the sickbeds of their loved ones in prayer or contemplation.
Credits: A man stabbing a woman with a stiletto. Oil painting, 18--.; Juaquin ? recovering from a wounded leg, 6 (?) September 1861. Oil painting by a Spanish painter, 1866; A child in bed, its parents praying to the Madonna del Parto. Oil painting.
This , artists and tell the story of how one man impacted generations of Deaf children around the world.
In 1880 it was declared that sign language in Deaf schools should be replaced with lip reading and speech, known as the oral method. One of the most vocal advocates of this form of teaching was Alexander Graham Bell, usually known as 'the inventor of the telephone' (although that's not actually correct).
And after 1880, the teaching of sign language was sidelined and suppressed, resulting in exclusion and stigma for generations of Deaf people.
Alt text: This reel shows the two artists Christine and Thomas inside a gallery space at Wellcome Collection, standing in front of a wall of red brick. We're also shown black-and-white photographs of Graham Bell, a man with a large white beard.
27/04/2026
Imagine being born in a time when the best treatment your doctor had to offer was throwing leeches on your body to feast on your blood 🥴
It was one of the most common medical treatments in Europe for over a thousand years, prescribed for everything from fevers to inflammation, even for mental health issues.
Still, despite its widespread popularity, it doesn't look like people enjoyed it.
[Alt text
All scenes you'd absolutely never volunteer yourself for... 😮💨
1. A grisly image to kick off with; this hand-coloured 19th-century lithograph depicts a shirtless man slumped in a chair while a nurse applies leeches as part of Broussais’s regimen of bleeding. Blood runs down his body into bowls on the floor, already filled to the brim, as a man in a top hat (the doctor, perhaps?) stands to the side with his arm extended. The scene captures the harsh, indiscriminate treatments used during the 1832 Paris cholera epidemic.
2. Illustration of a king wearing a richly brocaded blue jacket. He has a wiry beard and small, round, apple-like cheeks. His large, fleshy hands are covered with writhing leeches. The king, apparently, is attempting to reduce his body fat through leeching (we're doubtful it worked out for him).
3. A pale, anxious-looking woman in a red bonnet endures leeches applied to her neck by a wigged man and woman in a bonnet. In the foreground, a boy holds a glass container filled with leeches, ready for use (yuck).
Credits:
1. Leeches. Histoires Prodigieuses, Pierrie Boaistuau
2. A medical practitioner administers leeches to a patient. Colour lithograph after L. Boilly, 1827. Louis-Léopold Boilly Date- 1827 Reference- 652845i
3. Broussais instructs a nurse to carry on bleeding a blood-besmeared patient. Coloured lithograph after V.L.
When medieval people discovered cotton they were so shook the only explanation was it must be a sheep that grows from a stalk in the ground 🌚
Alt text: Our colleague shows a book from our collection featuring several images of the Lamb of Tartary, a creature people in medieval times believed was a lamb hanging on top of a plant stalk.
We see the lamb in mid-air as it is suspended by a stem reaching from the earth to its navel. It’s just chewing away on the grass as if this is all normal.
Instead of horns on its head are leaf-like tendrils.
While explaining the story, including a timeline starting in the 1200s, we see a woodcut of a plant with four buds, however rather surreally instead of flowers emerging from them instead are small lambs.
At the end, the little lamb bobs about on its stalk, eating all the food around it. The screen goes black. The lamb perishes leaving only the cotton behind.
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