The Guatemalan syphilis scandal
A team of American doctors, led by the distinguished physician Dr John Cutler, carried out secretive STD tests in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. The doctors experimented on more than one thousand prison...
20 Aug 202010min
The first modern asthma inhaler
Asthma affects more children than any other non-communicable disease - and it was a teenager who first asked her father "why can't they put my asthma medication in a spray can like hairspray?". Luckil...
19 Aug 202010min
The lost King of England
In 2012, archaeologists from the University of Leicester discovered the lost grave of Richard III under a car park in Leicester. Richard was the King of England more than 500 years ago and for centuri...
18 Aug 202012min
Surviving Saddam
Zainab Salbi grew up in the inner social circle of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, in the 1980s because her father worked as Saddam’s personal pilot. It was a world of apparently glamorous parties...
17 Aug 20209min
The invention of the modern ventilator
In August 1952, the Blegdam Hospital in the Danish capital Copenhagen was overwhelmed by hundreds of seriously ill polio patients. During the first weeks of the epidemic over 80 percent of the patient...
14 Aug 202013min
Scoring a victory for women's rights in Turkey
In 2004 feminist campaigners in Turkey forced a radical change in the law on crimes against women. The overhaul of the country's 80-year-old penal code meant a redefinition of crimes such as rape and ...
13 Aug 20209min
Beirut's Hotel War
At the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, Beirut’s luxury hotel district was turned into a battlefield, with rival groups of gunmen holed up in some of the most expensive accommodation in the Mi...
12 Aug 20208min
Bremen’s Elephant Statue
Amid the ongoing debate about how to handle historical monuments which commemorate colonialism and slavery, Witness History hears the story of a giant statue of an elephant in the German city of Breme...
11 Aug 202010min
