Distillations magazine

A crusading doctor’s stomach-churning efforts to beat back pellagra in the American South.

Baking homemade bread anchors us to millennia-long traditions.

A wildlife painter who ran afoul of xenophobic authorities during World War II found refuge and renewed purpose in the lab.

Caroline Hampton and the forgotten origins of the first personal protective equipment.

How a 19th-century invention could save lives today.

In the fight against breast cancer, entrenched interests and outmoded ideas may be hurting patients.

The rise, fall, and resurrection of the humble leech.

Will stigma and cost undermine the therapy’s promise?

Tracing the immense misery wreaked by the mosquito.

In the late 1960s an international contingent of psychiatrists took up a monumental task: making schizophrenia mean the same thing to doctors around the world.

It’s one thing to make a scientific discovery, but making it count is another thing entirely.

The biomedical researcher talks about her work using nanotechnology to detect and treat disease.

Humans have a masochistic love of capsaicin, a molecule responsible for the burn in hot peppers. That connection could be a key to pain relief.

Gene editing promises to revolutionize medicine. But how safe is safe enough for the patients testing these therapies?

Remembering the Spanish flu 100 years later.

The strange, sometimes sickening things we’ve done to understand what goes on inside our guts.

The latest painkiller revival has left a trail of bodies, with no end in sight.

Fermentation is the key to many of the lifesaving drugs we have today.