Until the early twentieth century, medical schools in the United States resembled today’s for-profit colleges, both in quality and reputation. There were no common standards for curriculum or ...

The final journey for London’s dead, circa 1860, was a trip on the London Necropolis Railway. The train would take the corpse and the accompanying mourners out of the city to the sprawling Brookwood ...

Psychiatric facilities and their patients have long been fodder for horror stories. As historian Troy Rondinone writes, films of the 1970s harnessed and shaped the American public’s understanding of ...

The idea that death should be merciful is not new. When a person is gravely wounded or terminally ill, when death is inevitable, and the suffering is so great that living no longer brings any joy to ...

For hundreds of years, almost all representations of ancient Greek and Roman marble statues have shown them to be clean, white marble. Today it’s clear that many of the statues were originally ...

Sir Robert Peel is popularly credited with the formation of the first modern municipal police force, founded in London, in 1829. Before him, what passed for policing was really a hodge-podge of ...

Q: What’s more than a mile deep, 400 miles long, and holds 20% of all of the Earth’s fresh surface water? A: Lake Baikal, which is a huge body of water located in a remote corner of southeastern ...

When the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux was born in 1884, in rural Illinois, movies barely existed. Micheaux was the son of former slaves. By the time he left home, at the age of 17, movies had progressed ...

Last year, a woman named Sandra Bland was pulled over for a minor traffic violation. After an ensuing—and heated—conversation recorded by dashcam, the police officer arrested Bland and took her to ...