A Burglar Caught by a Skeleton & Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press (16 page)

The patient arrived doubled up with pain: breathless, faint and exhausted, clutching her chest, her lips tinged an alarming shade of blue.

Doctors at St George’s Hospital in London knew just what to do. They treated her with an ether mixture and a laxative, and finished with a flourish, a new wonder drug that was fresh to the market, having been launched the year before as a cough suppressant.

To scientists it was diacetylmorphine, but the pharmaceutical firm Bayer, seeking a snappier brand name, called it Heroin. You may have heard of it.

The patient, alas, died a few days later, senior physician William Ewart told the annual meeting of the British Medical Association in 1899. Heroin wasn’t to blame, but its days as a moreish over-the-counter sedative proved equally short-lived.

Using a powerful narcotic to tackle a cough may seem a tad disproportionate, but this was an era when consumption was rife, and when industrialisation, urbanisation, poverty, overcrowding and poor sanitation conspired to short-change Britons of their allotted three score years and ten in all manner of unpleasant ways.

An age of disease inspired an age of remedies. From the travelling medicine men of the Wild West to the pages of the local press in Britain, miracle cures were everywhere.

Proof, if it is needed, lies in the British Newspaper Archive. Pick a paper. Any paper. The
Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald
, say. On … eeny meeny miny mo … Saturday, February 23, 1889.

On the front, an advertisement for Dr West’s Nerve and Brain Treatment promised a catch-all cure for conditions ranging from hysteria to depression to premature old age. 25 shillings bought a box containing six months’-worth of treatment. Expensive, but a small price compared to the ‘misery, decay and death’ you otherwise risked.

A turn of the page reveals a riot of medicinal adverts, from Clarke’s world-famed Blood Mixture for cancerous ulcers and scurvy sores to Holloway’s ointment to ease ‘bad legs and old wounds’ to Electro Galvanic Suspensory Belts, which were just the thing, it seems, for ‘night troubles’.

And then there was Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, which promised to ‘assuage pain of every kind’ from toothache to cancer. Dr Gibbon, of the army medical staff in Calcutta, swore by it, according to his frank testimony. ‘Nine doses completely cured me of diarrhoea’, he crowed, though considering the principal ingredients of Chlorodyne included chloroform, tincture of cannabis and laudanum, it’s possible Dr Gibbon wasn’t so much cured of diarrhoea as not especially bothered about it any longer.

Prevention, though, was better than cure, and at the start of Victoria’s reign there were a number of medical men who believed one thing in particular needed preventing: pollution. Not the literal kind, but the sort Victorians euphemistically referred to as self-pollution.

‘Many physicians of high authority have maintained that two-thirds of the diseases to which the human race is liable have had their origin in certain solitary practices’, declared our old friend Eugene Becklard in his
Physiological Mysteries
.

That figure, M. Becklard thought, was fancifully high, but he was pretty certain that consumption, impotence and lunacy were the effects of excessive fondness for one’s own company. Females were as keen on the hobby as males, he warned, making use of ‘large foreign substances to procure pleasure’.

Ah. Perhaps
that’s
why Mrs Beeton recommended boiling carrots for two and a quarter hours.

A Wonderful Recovery

On Saturday at Eastbourne, a tradesman named Thomas Wickens was charged with attempting to commit suicide by driving four long nails into his head.

Dr McQueen produced four long nails which he had with difficulty withdrawn from the head of Wickens. These nails had penetrated three inches, and gone through the brain; but to the surprise of the medical staff at the Memorial Hospital, Wickens had fully recovered.

Wickens said he drove the nails into his head in succession with a hammer, and that he had felt better in his head since the occurrence. He is now sane and able to resume business; and, medically, his recovery is regarded as the most wonderful on record. The magistrate ordered him to be discharged.

The Citizen
, Gloucester, August 4, 1890

An Extraordinary Cure

The New York
Sun
gives the story of a cure effected on two violently insane patients in the Hudson County Lunatic Asylum, by the superintendent, Dr George W. King, formerly of Springfield, Massachusetts. His successful experiment was to place the two men together in a cell, each with the instruction to watch the other, who was insane. They sat from morning to night gazing compassionately at each other; in a week they were as quiet as if perfectly sane, and in two months were discharged cured.

The Evening News
, Portsmouth, March 15, 1886

A New Way of Pulling Out a Tooth!

The bravest among us often quail at the prospect of a visit to the dentist, and endure a very martyrdom from toothache rather than submit to the extraction of the offending tooth (says the
Evening Standard
).

But when one’s courage is screwed to the extracting point, it is evidently to the patient’s advantage that the operation should be performed by a skilful hand, rather than by the unpractised one of the sufferer.

A Frenchman residing in the environs of Paris held a contrary opinion, and it is still doubtful whether his error may not cost him his life, owing to the unusual manner in which he played the
role
of dentist.

He had long been suffering from toothache, but obstinately refused to have recourse to a dentist, and at length, finding the pain unendurable, took the following uncommon method of extraction.

To the tooth he attached firmly a long string, to the string a heavy stone, thus armed he proceeded to the topmost storey of the house he occupied, opened the window, and hurled the stone into the air.

The weight of the stone and the length of the string produced so violent a shock, that not only was the tooth pulled out, but with it a portion of the man’s jaw, his neck being so painfully twisted that he fainted.

Hours ensued ere consciousness returned. When he ultimately recovered his senses it was found necessary to remove him to a hospital, where he now lies in a most precarious state. Should he quit the hospital a living man, it is hoped he will also be a wiser one.

The Alnwick Mercury
, March 2, 1878

Cured by Lightning

A remarkable case of paralysis being cured by lightning is reported from Bad Beyhausen.

A Berlin doctor ordered a patient of his who had been paralysed in both feet for many years to take the baths, not for a cure as that appeared hopeless, but thinking the invalid might possibly derive some slight benefit from the waters.

The patient was ordered to be as much as possible in the open air, and was in the habit of sitting outside the house in a bath-chair.

Recently a violent thunderstorm came on, and everybody in the house forgot the sick man was outside. Suddenly a vivid flash of lightning and a terrific crash of thunder reminded them of the fact, and they were just about to go in search of him when the invalid appeared in their midst, walking without any difficulty. From that moment, he has appeared to be completely cured.

This case, the
Hoyaer Wochenblatt
says, has excited great interest among the medical men; some of whom believe the cure to be effected merely by fear and the intense desire to walk, others think that the electric current may have assisted the paralysed limbs to move.

The Huddersfield Daily Chronicle
, September 7, 1891

Strange Adventure

A correspondent writes to a contemporary: ‘An Oxfordshire woman met with an experience a few days back which should act as a warning to intending visitors to lunatic asylums.

‘The person in question journeyed to Littlemore, a village four miles distant from Oxford where there is an asylum, with the intention of visiting a female patient. The porter, having admitted her, is said to have duly passed her on to one of the matrons with the words “to visit a female patient;” but the nurse appears to have caught only the last words of the sentence, and a mistake resulted which cost the visitor a good deal of unpleasantness, to say the least of it.

‘The stranger was taken to the top of the building, under the belief that she was going to see her friend, and then she was suddenly shut into an empty room. Shortly afterwards a nurse entered, and, to the consternation of the visitor, at once proceeded to undress her. Protestations and remonstrances were alike unavailing, and firmly, though not unkindly, the poor woman was stripped and placed in a bath, after which she was forcibly put to bed.

‘By this time the mistaken lunatic was of course in a frantic state of alarm, which only favoured the belief that she was really a mad woman. Where the gruesome farce might have ended it is not pleasant to contemplate; but by a lucky accident the mistake was discovered later in the day, and the unfortunate woman was set at liberty with profuse apologies.