Dr Margaret McCartney is a GP. Yet she refuses cervical and breast cancer screening and hasn't measured her cholesterol. She explains her reasons

Jonathan Freedland's new Sam Bourne yarn sheds light on one of Britain's more chilling wartime secrets, he tells Christian House

A man is believed to have become Britain's first "male mother" by giving birth, despite having undergone sex change surgery.

A drug intended to prevent miscarriage is blamed for causing cancer in the daughters – and possibly even granddaughters – of women who took it decades ago. By Sarah Morrison and Jaymi McCann

She weighed less than a couple of mobile phones at birth, but now Melinda's made medical history

Vaccination against virus urged following increase in cases linked to sexually transmitted infection

Roopa Farooki cites her late father, Nasir Farooki, and his gambler's life, as the inspiration for her fifth novel. Her words are warm and were we to read the acknowledgement before the novel, we might imagine a story that pays homage to a roguishly loveable father. However roguish the central character of The Flying Man might be - a charlatan by trade, despite his family wealth - he is not loveable but a shallow, selfish charmer. Farooki creates a difficult, despicable anti-hero and attempts to shed light on what keeps him in his psychologically stunted state.

Babies resulting from frozen IVF embryos are bigger at birth than IVF babies created from "fresh" embryos that are transferred to the womb within days of conception, a study has found.

Jody and Simon Blake have spent the past couple of months showing off their twins Reuben and Floren to friends – and delighting in the looks of bemusement that greet them. Because while Reuben went back to school yesterday, his sister Floren will have to wait until 2017.

It might sound like a bad joke to suggest that Catholic nuns should be prescribed the contraceptive pill. But two Australian doctors say it would protect them from the "accursed pest" of cancer which has been recognised for 300 years.

The worldwide explosion in premature births is fuelling a rise in emotional and behavioural problems, researchers say.

Exercise daily? Eat your fruit and veg? Stopped smoking? Bad news. You could be doomed, nonetheless. David Barker's theory sounds pretty hokey when you first hear about it. The idea is that, irrespective of that £100 gym membership, those five-a-day and that kicked habit, much of our health has been determined by the time we get out of the womb. You can see why mothers don't believe it when, on Horizon: The Nine Months That Made You, they are asked about Barker's theory, at random in the street. It seems less a scientific prescription, more a kind of fortune-teller's ruse. I'm not sure I want to believe it, either. After all, life would have been a lot more fun if I'd known I had a free pass all along (for this was one enormous baby, back in the day).

Woodward's black comedy looks at some of the more carnal pleasures to be had in wartime Britain. Tory Pace is sitting out the Blitz when she receives a missive from her POW husband asking that she writes a dirty letter: "I mean really filthy, full of all the dirtiest words and deed you can thing of".