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Medical Periodicals: Mining the Past, by Oxford based science writer Georgina Ferry, has been published in The Lancet (Volume 385, number 9987, 27 June 2015)

Many congratulations to Professor Sally Shuttleworth who has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

On 8 May three quarters of the Diseases of Modern Life team - Melissa Dickson, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jennifer Wallis - visited Newcastle University to meet with the Fashionable Diseases team and take part in a workshop.

We are very happy to be featuring a guest post from Alex Hailey, who has kindly agreed to introduce to our readers the India Office Medical Archives at the British Library.

With the crowds, the launches, and the world's media watching, the Oxford and Cambridge boat race seems a fairly riotous occasion.

There is a well-known anecdote about an appearance Peter Sellers made on Parkinson many years ago.

'Inside Passengers; or, the Wonderful Adventures of Luke and Belinda' was a 15-part series published in The Girls' Own Paper in 1885-86, penned by 'A London Physician'.

A recent visit to the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford saw me lingering a little more than usual in front of the electricity and galvanism section.

There's an old joke. A man clearing out his attic comes across an oil painting and a dusty violin.

Flower missions - the donation, arrangement, and distribution of fresh flowers to the sick and needy - were said to have originated in the US in the late 1860s...

I remember being fascinated by the glittering chandeliers, the massive, colourful bouquets of flowers, the guests from all over the world sporting their traditional attires and, of course, the music.

The "Diseases of Modern Life" team wishes all its readers and colleagues a very happy Christmas and a healthy and successful New Year.

If the project of medical science may be described as the exploration of the human body, then surely its final, vastest, most mysterious frontier is the brain.

I'm sure the old platitude that 'Christmas comes earlier every year' is true.

Reading Victorian periodicals is one of the most important aspects of our work on the "Diseases of Modern Life" project.

Making the news last week was the amusing story of the zoo in Belgium that recently captured a video of a family of elephants appearing to sway in unison to a performance of live classical music.

Reading the work of nineteenth-century doctors, it is striking that many tried their hand at fiction as well as penning medical articles and books.

Last weekend provided us with an exciting opportunity to introduce our research projects to a slightly different audience than the one we usually interact with: the ladies and gentlemen who participated in Meeting Minds.

Earlier this year, Huffington Post writer Candace Davis asked whether 'people-watching' - sitting in the window of a café and analyzing passers-by - was an entirely harmless exercise.

There is a folder in my desk-drawer at the moment, one of several containing the fruits of months of research into various aspects of nineteenth-century science and disease.

At all events, I felt the want, and I supplied it. Tea was my companion - at first the ordinary black tea, made in the usual way, not too strong

The tragedy of comedy, for those who work at creating it, at least, is that jokes will go off.

On Tuesday evening, I found myself listening to the sounds of burping sand dunes in the Mojave Desert.

We are big on peace and quiet in Oxford. For eight hours a day, the most that is likely to disturb me from my research is the faint lowing of cattle in the fields behind the college, or the movement of papers around me in the Bodleian.