Victorian England has always conjured up some wonderful images: large estates, well-kept gardens, lavish dinner parties, leisurely evenings with live bands, people laughing and joking, and fair ladies strolling through the parks with little umbrellas. But there was another side to the era – a darker side – that would give even modern ears the creeps. It was a time when doctors didn’t boil water to make you tea; when anesthesia was used on babies, and anesthetics were available at the local drugstore. In those days, a certain treatment plan might give you an orgasm, and some drugs that were meant to save your life ended up killing you. The following are some of the routine medical treatments of the nineteenth century that will not leave you stunned if you look at them! So Surgical Before the discovery of anesthetics, the patient was awake throughout the surgery and could feel every step of the doctor! Even a glass of brandy couldn’t take away the pain of pulling out a tooth, let alone amputating a limb, removing a breast, or scraping a sternum. Anesthetics didn’t come along until the mid-nineteenth century, and until then doctors were proud of the speed with which they operated, because the whole procedure was an unbearable ordeal for both patient and doctor. Consumption Consumption (also known as tuberculosis) was thought to be a disease only of sinners, those who wore fancy clothes, masturbated, drank alcohol, and smoked in the pursuit of pleasure. There are many means of treatment, one of the less costly (and more common) practices is to pump a mixture of gases into the rectum. Painkillers Laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol (as well as highly addictive narcotics), is very cheap and readily available from local pharmacies! Tincture of opium was often used to ease the pain of the terminally ill, and was widely used for a variety of major and minor ailments, such as cholera, menstrual cramps, the common cold, yellow fever, and dysentery. Cholera Throughout the nineteenth century, thousands of people died from this bacterial disease. An otherwise healthy person suffering from cholera would experience severe stomach cramps, followed by severe diarrhea (stools in the form of rice soup) and vomiting. The patient remains conscious until death, and is so dehydrated that his blood becomes as thick as glue and his face and limbs are sunken and blue. Doctors treated cholera patients by bleeding them, giving them turpentine enemas, making them drink brandy, and pouring boiling water on their stomachs! Croup This disease infects the trachea, throat and lungs (causing a barking cough), and the onset of the disease was usually at night. children between the ages of 6 months and 3 years were susceptible, and the symptoms usually disappeared within a few days (except in extreme cases). However, the treatment for croup in Victorian England was to give sick children hot baths (this was OK) and put leeches on their throats! Hysteria Hysteria is today’s premenstrual syndrome, and symptoms include emotional lability, lower abdominal discomfort, and sentimentality. In the second half of the nineteenth century, doctors treated hysterical patients by making them orgasm! These orgasms were not called orgasms at the time, they were called tremors, because it was widely believed during the Victorian era that since women could not experience sexual fulfillment, they were incapable of orgasm. Extreme cases of hysteria went so far as to have their uterus removed! Infantile Agitation To calm teething or agitated infants, they were fed a drink made of opium and gin. Morphine was also widely used and was said to calm babies, but sometimes it just put them to rest. Morphine was also sometimes prescribed to children with thrush, a fungal infection of the mouth common in infants and young children. In Victorian times, doctors had no qualms about prescribing highly addictive narcotics to babies! Syphilis Sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis are treated with calomel. Glymercury is a toxic mineral (mercuric chloride) that causes severe mercury poisoning in patients, which later damages the gums and destroys the lining of the intestines. Glymercury was used as a laxative and laxative, at first in tablets and then directly as an injection. Arsenic was also used to relieve the symptoms of syphilis. Bloodletting The Victorians believed in bloodletting for healing, and doctors believed that bloodletting cured many diseases at their source. For conditions such as cholera, bloodletting therapy was almost impossible to administer because the patient’s blood was so concentrated that it had become too viscous and tar-like to be released. Bloodletting therapy in this era was not only useless in most cases, but rather added more pain to the patient who was suffering from the disease. Treatments for the Dying The process of dying was torturous enough on its own, and some of the treatments used on the terminally ill were torture even for the healthiest of people. These treatments include boiling, steaming, scalding, and the complete destruction of the stomach, intestinal lining, and lining of the mouth by acidic tinctures or by the introduction of poisonous substances into the patient’s body by means of enemas. These antiquated treatments seldom achieve any healing, but instead send the patient to an early grave!