Distillations magazine

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.

Warfarin started life as a rat poison, and for all its success the anticoagulant remains as dangerous as its origin suggests.

Where do new drugs come from? And why do so many fail?

How Joseph Lister’s application of germ theory revolutionized surgery in the mid-19th century.

Do cats mess with your brain?