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photo credit: Robert T Bell via photopin cc |
Not to mention with little means to license doctors, there were quacks everywhere! By the mid-nineteenth century, most people were suspicious of doctors and would resort to home or folk remedies before calling upon a “professional.” Many of these issues were addressed toward the end of the century when medical licensing became enforced. However, this also eradicated midwives and other knowledgeable healers.
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photo credit: El Bibliomata via photopin cc |
Also in the late nineteenth century, the advent of electricity began to change medicine. Doctors conducted experiments and rural doctors went ahead and
started to charge for coursing low levels of electric current through the body
in an effort to cure a variety of ailments.
The New York State Senate also decided to use electricity for the
death penalty in 1890. After much research into various
killing practices, a death commission decided electricity would be a humane for of death at least more humane than hanging. Even though an overdose of morphine would kill a human being by putting them into a deep
sleep, the council passed over it for fear that it would cause society anxieties regarding
the new hypodermic needle. Although the very first electrocution ended with a
burnt corpse and a room of horrified journalists, doctors, and scientists,
within a month those same individuals rallied behind the electric chair in the
press. The story of the first electrocution is incredibly interesting, which is
why it’s the topic of my second novel TheBinding of Saint Barbara.
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On the fringes of medicine also came psychology, a field
born in the nineteenth century that created entire new ways of explaining why
certain individuals were the way they were and providing a curable explanation
for abnormal behavior and lifestyle choices including lesbianism,
homosexuality, and hyper-sexuality. With discoveries regarding the inner
workings of the human mind came anxieties displayed in Robert
Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which suggested concerns of criminality lurking inside the minds of any and all.
Women were a large area of focus for the new brain
medicine as doctors coined the mental illness of hysteria an explanation for
female emotional episodes, depression, and frustration. Unfortunately, much of
the treatment could cause further insanity through sensory deprivation, isolation,
and even surgery to remove the uterus. Doctors and psychologists theorized that
female hysteria was caused by the detachment of the uterus which then floated
around the body irritating various functions. This was just one of many odd and absurd theories surrounding hysteria.
Although women were targeted for mental disturbances,
anyone could be condoned insane, and there certainly were people who were
mentally ill. However, nineteenth century hospitals and mental institutions were
truly frightening places and without any certainties about how to diagnose mental illness, all sorts of people were sent there. Dorothea Dix was a huge proponent of prison and
asylum reform, witnessing and testifying to patients being locked in closets
and beaten into submission. The
horror of insane asylums was brought to life in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
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photo credit: Carlos Varela via photopin cc |
This is really just a brief overview. I'm not even going into Victorian dentistry!
For more information check out these websites:
BBC Victorian Medicine from Fluke to Theory
Victorian Medicine Resource
Antique Shop Image of Victorian Electric Shock Machine
Health and Medicine in the 19th Century - More on use of Electricity
The History Channel's Information Page on Dorothea Dix and her Asylum Reform
Dorothea Dix's Actual Reports of Atrocities Witnessed in Asylums
Comments: How do you think you can use this information in your story?

Stephanie Carroll is the author of A White Room and "Forget Me Not" featured in Legacy: An Anthology. She blogs about magical realism, her research into the Victorian Era and Gilded Age, writing, and life in general at www.stephaniecarroll.net and at The Unhinged Historian. She also founded Unhinged and Empowered, a blog for Navy wives and girlfriends.
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