Dangerous, even deadly: Teething in Jane Austen’s World
!8th century French physician Jean Baumes (1783) wrote “All experience teaches that dentition is to be dreaded.” Why the dread?
Continue reading →Category Archives: Regency Life
Regency Medicine: Betwixt and Between
I’d like to welcome Kyra Kramer today as she shares a fascinating article on Regency Medicine and how it was more medieval than modern. There would be significant changes in health care in the later decades of the 1800s, with the emergence of germ theory producing biomedicine as we would recognize it by the Edwardian age. The Regency, however, was in some ways the last gasp of medieval medicine – a Tudor merchant would be more … Continue reading →
Providing for young ladies’ future in Jane Austen’s World
How did dowries provide for a young woman’s future? A Woman’s Dowry Though Pride and Prejudice’s (1995, movie version) Mr. Bennet referred to dowries as “bribes to worthless young men to marry his daughters,” dowries were more commonly considered a means by which a responsible family compensated a husband for their daughter’s lifelong upkeep. How’s that for a romantic notion? Dowries (or more commonly the interest earned off a dowry) were used to provide a … Continue reading →
Marriage and Coverture in Jane Austen’s World
It’s hard to believe how different women’s lives were in Austen’s day. Marriage and coverture, a legal concept, effectively took away her personhood. The Concept of Coverture In 1765, William Blackstone presented a common man’s language interpretation of English law. He explained the law’s approach to women’s legal existence and rights in marriage which remained largely unchanged until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1884. Blackstone said: By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the … Continue reading →
A Touch of Consumption
I’d like to welcome Kyra Kramer today as she shares a fascinating article on consumption–known today as tuberculosis–during the regency era. Medical anthropology is the study of how culture frames health, illness, and medicine. Since cultures change over time, you can also look at medical anthropology from a historical perspective. For example, the way British people during the Regency era conceptualized consumption – AKA tuberculosis – was very different from the way people in the … Continue reading →