For years doctors in the US made little attempt to save the lives of premature babies, but there was one place distressed parents could turn for help – a sideshow on Coney Island. Here one man saved thousands of lives, writes Claire Prentice, and eventually changed the course of American medical science.

Secrets of the £1.5m Scots mansion bought with the proceeds of an act of royal ‘treachery’ which saw the Queen’s intimate confidante banished from the House of Windsor for life

There was a time when people with severe mental illness might be given an operation to sever connections in the brain. Lobotomy became one of the most notorious surgical procedures of the 20th Century, writes Claire Prentice, but retired neurosurgeon, Henry Marsh, who once carried out a modified version of the operation, tells her it’s wrong to divide doctors into heroes and villains.

In 1976, the staff of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris dismantled an exhibit which had been on show since 1816 and dispatched it to the storage vaults…

As the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, one song will usher in 2012 in time zones around the world: Robert Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne.” Even in Burns’s native Scotland, many people don’t understand all the words, but that’s done nothing to diminish the song’s appeal.