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Regency Medicine: Betwixt and Between — 6 Comments

  1. That’s a really interesting post. My word how much medicine has improved since those times. Lucky for us!!! They did they’re best I suppose with what they had. Can’t wait to read Mansfield Parsonage.

  2. So what ails Anne de Bourgh?
    At least they had a cure-all for every ailment! Have a fever? Drain your blood. Diarrhea? Drain your blood. Menstrual cramps? Drain your blood. Wound keep bleeding? Drain your blood.

    • There is a bit too much to chose from to even begin to speculate on Miss De Bourgh (although I suspect hypochondria! or even Munchhausen’s by proxy). Oddly enough, there are a few diseases that actually are helped by blood letting … but so rare as to be useless for most people. Galen did say, however, you should NOT bleed small children or pregnant women.

  3. I’m a pharmacist by profession, Kyra, and some of what you’ve posted is familiar to me from the University courses in History of Medicine and History of Pharmacy that formed part of my degree course. One thing I know for sure is that I would definitely NOT want to live in Regency times! No real painkillers apart from laudanum, no antiseptics/local anaesthetics apart from pouring alcoholic spirits over wounds, no antibiotics (though we have overused them!).

    Last week I watched the 1996 Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and there was a scene during Marianne’s illness where the doctor had obviously just bled her into a bowl designed especially for that purpose. Kind of brings it home to you how few effective treatments they had, I don’t think Jane Austen actually mentions Marianne being bled (someone correct me if I’ wrong, please) but she does mention how ineffective the doctor’s medicines seemed to be.

    Thanks for a fascinating post and good luck with your book!

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