Foundations

Public bathing, ubiquitous around the world and through the ages, plays an often-unappreciated role in public health.

The father-and-son duo Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka crafted thousands of scientifically accurate models of plants and sea creatures as teaching aids. 

Pathologist Peyton Rous made a groundbreaking discovery in the early 20th century, but his work wasn’t widely recognized until more than 40 years later. 

Pioneering nurse Florence Nightingale had an eye for creating memorable graphics that helped convince the general population that including sanitation reforms as part of public health policy would save British soldiers’ lives.

German physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld founded a revolutionary clinic where transgender people could receive gender-affirming care, but he left behind a complicated medical and scientific legacy.

Researchers overseeing the clinical trial for the first FDA-approved oral contraceptive claimed the drug gave the Puerto Rican participants power over their family planning. Critics claimed the women were exploited.

Ancient stashes of animal bones, tools, and other artifacts are often dismissed as archaic garbage heaps, but the deposits provide glimpses of the cultural practices and environmental conditions of past Indigenous settlements.

Makio Murayama, a Japanese-American biochemist who was turned away from the Manhattan Project due to his heritage, rose to prominence for his work uncovering the link between the structure of hemoglobin and the mechanisms of sickle cell disease.

Putting on a mask to protect oneself and others against disease is nothing new, nor is resistance to mask-wearing, but mask designs have changed considerably from their first iterations.

Nan Songer, a spider expert living in California, played an integral part in the Allies’ success in World War II by supplying silk for bombsights.

A series of rodent experiments showed that even with abundant food and water, personal space is essential to prevent societal collapse.

Edward Ricketts built his laboratory just onshore from the swirling tidepools of Monterey Bay, California, an ideal backdrop against which he developed a new system for studying the ecology of any given habitat.

Percy Lavon Julian, a young, Black scientist working in Jim Crow America, gained international recognition after beating chemists at the University of Oxford in the race to synthesize the alkaloid physostigmine, used for decades as a treatment for glaucoma.

Before its association with a pining for the toys or TV shows of yesteryear, nostalgia was deemed a dangerous psychiatric disorder.

Elaborate annotations hidden in a copy of Sir James Edward Smith’s The English Flora hinted at the life of a mysterious woman botanist.

Researchers continue to debate whether US President Abraham Lincoln was coming down with smallpox as he delivered his famous Gettysburg Address, and if he had been immunized.

How the pungent odor that occurs after a light rain became a well-studied phenomenon

Intrigued by an optical illusion he experienced while traveling in Scotland, Robert Addams wrote what is now considered one of the definitive observational accounts of so-called motion aftereffects.

Centuries of folklore backed by scientists in the early 1900s have perpetuated the idea that menstruating women can exert dangerous forces.