The Edwardian Era brought a new craze in plastic surgery – paraffin wax injections.🕯 The promise of a perfect nose👃or chin quickly faded, when it turned out that wax could wander beneath the skin causing infections, blood clots, and even cancer. ☠️
For reference, I learned about upper class women fixing their wax noses in a great BBC documentary series Blood and Guts (there’s also a book available)
After her husband’s death, Mary Shelley kept his calcified heart 💛 in a desk drawer. And even though some modern scholars believe it was just his liver, Mary herself was convinced that she had Percy’s heart. Quite a suitable keepsake for the author of Frankenstein! 🧟♂️
Interesting article on the subject: http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7985.pdf
Laudanum 😴, lead 🤪, alcohol 🥂… all your tips under the last post were great! And yet, there is something else you might add to your healing arsenal… ☠️
“To ease the pain of teething, hang a dead mole around the neck of your baby.” – find even weirder treatments in this handy booklet: Hints on Health from the Victorians.
The harrowing conditions in match factories, including the use of highly poisonous ☠️ white phosphorus ☠️, were not a secret in the Victorian times. However, It was not until the matchgirls’ strike of 1888 🗣 that the situation started to get better.
Find out more about the matchmakers in “Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History” (book fragments are available on Google books)
Garrotting panics and hysterias appeared in a few major cities in the mid-19th century. A few creative merchants quickly saw profitable opportunities in the public’s fear…
Here’s a great article on one of such garroting panics: Today I Found Out.
There were no regulations on buying and selling arsenic until 1851, and even then it could be relatively easy purchased by anyone who didn’t cause any suspicion.
You can read more on arsenic and other poisons in The Secret Poisoner: The Victorian Age of Poisoning.
The invention of the stethoscope was inspired by a rather embarrassing moment in a young French doctor’s life. You can read more about René Laennec here.
For a few centuries, mummies (both human and feline) were used by some in truly surprising and disturbing ways. Read more about the 1888 cat-mummy craze here.
“…It was an age of high infant mortality. Even picture books prepared children for the melancholy realities.”
I stumbled upon this version of Three Little Kittens in the book Necropolis, London and Its Dead.
