Wellcome Collection

Subway Takes, tired of Hollywood celebrities, turns instead to history's most eminent medical innovators. Time travel might have affected Kareem's wardrobe.

[Alt text:

KH: What's your take?

Louis Pasteur: Heating milk makes it substanially safer to drink

KH: 100% agree

LP: Heating the liquid to just 60 degrees kills bacteria like listeria and e coli

KH: It's true, no one likes e-coli, there's no e coli fans out there

LP: Then you gotta seal it so more germs can't get in

KH: Germ theory? Now that's getting controversial

LP: But it's true! And guess what? They're going to name the process after me: pasteurisation

KH: Loving the confidence. Get your liquids pasteurised people!]

Check out Louis' soundcloud here: https://wellcome.info/pasteur

Florence Nightingale, who was born on this day in 1820, didn’t just change nursing; she changed how we think about care itself.

She believed fresh air, light, and clean spaces mattered as much as medicine, shaping new ideas about hospitals and healing that still resonate today.

Nightingale's story isn’t simple. Although she is often perceived as a lone genius, the ideas we associate with Nightingale were built through significant shared knowledge, observation and labour, not all of it fully acknowledged at the time.

To remember Nightingale now is to acknowledge the force of her ideas, while looking at the wider networks and individuals that shaped them.

[Alt text: Florence Nightingale stands beside a hospital bed at night, holding a lamp as she looks down at a wounded soldier lying under white sheets. The dimly lit ward includes other beds and receding figures in the background.]

Credit: Crimean War: Florence Nightingale with her lamp at a patient's bedside. Colour lithograph, 1891, after H. Rae. Wellcome Collection. Reference: 9983i

Do you talk with your hands?

Sign language has a history as long as any other kind of language, but these images from our collection capture some early ways in which hand-signs were made into formal systems. The first official written record of sign language in English comes from an account of a marriage ceremony in 1576, describing how the Deaf groom, “for the expression of his minde instead of words, of his own accorde used these signs: first he embraced her with his armes, and took her by the hande, putt a ring upon her finger and layde his hande upon her harte.” ❤️

[Alt text: Three images showing historical illustrations of sign language, including versions of French and British alphabetical fingerspelling and an engraving of delicately shaded hands making signs.]

Credits

1. The French sign language alphabet with ornate border, above it, the Abbé C.M. de l'Epée and the Abbé Sicard. Lithograph. Reference: 18015i
2. Hands showing the sign language alphabet. Coloured line engraving.
3. Two hands illustrating sign language with Hebrew characters. Engraving by J.W. Michaelis. Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark

Banke Holydaye plans: touchinge grasse for ye sake of mine sanitye 🥴

Alt text: Three details of an illustration of a 15th century French gardener or agricultural worker in lovely mauve tabard clasping the stem of a tree/big leafy plant. The young tree-hugger's face is a picture of spaced-out satisfaction.

Credit: Livre des simples médecines. Date: c. 1470
Reference: MS.626

Proof that a bit of confidence can go a long way.

Credit: Acrobats- a woman lying on top of a pole holding on to a boy tied to one end of a rope, while someone in a penguin costume watches a man do a headstand. Gouache painting on mica by an Indian artist. Date- [between 1800 and 1899?] Reference- 581132i

Alt text: an Indian gouache painting of a scene showing a group of acrobats displaying their various talents. Hidden amongst them, in plain sight, is a giant white bird masquerading as a penguin.

A second image shows the catalogue information that we have on this item, which claims that this penguin-shaped figure is actually a person in a penguin costume, which adds another layer of mystery.