Gresham provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on the Gresham website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
In this lecture, I look at what people from the late eighteenth century to the present thought they knew about toes, arches, heels, and ankles. What makes a beautiful foot? How have ideas of foot-beauty changed over time?
This lecture looks at nineteenth-century fads involving stomachs, including the medical prescription of tapeworms that were supposed to live in a person’s stomach and “eat” food on their behalf.
Is the clitoris simply a female version of the male penis? Many scientists and biologists in the past thought so. It is only in recent decades that the physiology of the clitoris has become understood.
What happens when doctors and parents cannot agree on whether a child should be given experimental medical treatment? Why is there any question mark over a parent’s right to decide if medical treatment for their child continues?
Using DNA and gene-based therapy to treat human diseases may sound like science-fiction, but there are already several gene therapies in use today. This lecture will describe what gene therapy is all about, the recent advancements in the field and what the future holds for gene therapies.
South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) and the Afrikaner people it served had, since the 17th century drawn a distinction between white ‘Christians’ and the apparently unconvertible ‘heathen’ peoples around them. Theology legitimised apartheid, but was also instrumental in its end.
A discussion of the nature of consciousness founded in startling 1853 experiments on living, decapitated frogs. The debate brought in the greatest minds of the age and is still with us today.