The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed. Judith Flanders

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Some fears appeared relatively trivial, but uncertain diagnostic techniques meant that many major illnesses could not be identified and separated from minor ones. Seemingly harmless childhood ailments might end in death. Mrs Gaskell reported in her journal on Marianne’s sudden attack of croup: ‘We heard a cough like a dog’s bark … We gave her 24 drops of Ipec: wine, and Sam & Mr Partington both came. They said we had done quite rightly, and ordered her some calomel powders^† … [W]e have reason to be most thankful that she is spared to us … Poor little Eddy Deane was taken ill of croup on the same night, and died on the following Monday.’⁴¹ Poor little Eddy Deane may very well have had diphtheria: this and croup were often confused.

      Even teething, that routine, ordinary, minor fret of babydom, was a major cause of anxiety. Mrs Pedley estimated that 16 per cent of child deaths were teething-related, rather than actually from teething itself. She tried to persuade parents that it was not the malady but the cure that was killing their children. She wrote that, when their babies fretted before their new teeth began to show, worried parents decided that ‘milk no longer agrees with the child’, so they stopped the milk and instead fed the infants on unsuitable foods. This upset their digestions; they were therefore given drugs, most of which contained opium, and, not unnaturally, the babies died in convulsions – more deaths put down to that dread disease, teething.⁴² Her common sense, however, was drowned out by others who recommended syrup of poppies (Mrs Warren) or purgatives (Dr Chavasse, Mrs Beeton and Mrs Warren) or surgery – lancing the gums (all of the above).

      Mrs Beeton listed the symptoms of teething, and they included, apart from the ones we would recognize today – inflamed gums and an increase of saliva – restlessness, irregular bowel movements, fever, disturbed sleep, ‘fretfulness … rolling of the eyes, convulsive startings, labourious breathing’: pretty well everything, in fact. The answer was to give purgatives and a teething ring, put the child in a hot bath, and if necessary lance the gums, ‘which will often snatch the child from the grasp of death … [otherwise] the unrelieved irritation endanger[s] inflammation of the brain, water on the head, rickets, and other lingering affections’. Indeed, Mrs Beeton stressed that rickets and water on the brain were ‘frequent results of dental irritation’.⁴³ Mrs Beeton at least made one concession to the strength of the drugs routinely given to infants: she suggested that, before weaning, medicine could be given via the milk, the mother swallowing the appropriate dose. That was an improvement on many systems, where it was generally expected that the nurse would give the newborn infant a few drops of castor oil as soon as it was born. Mrs Gaskell followed the general trend: Marianne ‘had one violent attack … but we put her directly into warm water, & gave her castor oil, sending at the same time for a medical man, who decided that the inflammatory state of her body was owing to her being on the point of cutting her eye-teeth’.⁴⁴

      ‘Convulsions’ were a similarly created illness: death due to convulsions was common, but even at the time many attributed the deaths to the opium-based medicines used as a cure. Mrs Beeton (whose chapter on child-rearing, it should be emphasized, was written for her by a doctor) gave a description of a convulsion: ‘the infant cries out with a quick, short scream, rolls up its eyes, arches its body backwards, its arms become bent and fixed, and the fingers parted; the lips and eyelids assume a dusky leaden colour, while the face remains pale, and the eyes open, glassy, or staring’. This might last a few minutes only, and could surely describe almost any crying child. Yet the worried carers who saw a convulsion in these symptoms were advised to put the baby in a hot bath, give it a teaspoonful of brandy and water and, an hour after the bath, administer a purgative, repeated once or twice every three hours.⁴⁵ Such ‘spasms’ could also be treated by patent medicines such as J. Collis Browne’s Cholodyne, ‘advertised as a cure for coughs, colds, colic, cramp, spasms, stomach ache, bowel pains, diarrhoea and sleeplessness’. This contained not only opium, but also chloral hydrate and cannabis.⁴⁶

      Children who had once had trouble with fits, or with their teething (and, given these symptoms, all babies did: has anyone ever had a baby who did not at some stage suffer from ‘disturbed sleep’ or ‘fretfulness’?), would shortly have problems caused by the purgatives and opium that had been administered to treat them, starting off a fresh round of medication. Mrs Pedley again tried to calm fears, pointing out that nurses often said children were subject to fits when what they meant was that they had a twitch, or they blinked frequently, or moved their arms and legs after feeding (which she attributed to flatulence).⁴⁷

      Although teething seems a bizarre worry from our perspective, nineteenth-century parents had many more real anxieties than their descendants: by the time they reached the age of five, 35 out of every 45 children had had either smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, typhus or enteric fever (or a combination), all of which could kill.⁴⁸ Lesser illnesses, such as chickenpox and mumps, were also more dangerous than today, because of the drugs given to treat them. So much of what we take for granted was simply not available, or only barely. A great deal of progress had been made by mid-century: the stethoscope, the thermometer and the percussive technique for listening to the patient’s chest had all been developed; the smallpox vaccine was routinely urged on all parents. Yet what was available and what was commonly used were not necessarily the same thing. Louise Creighton, as late as the early 1880s, was misled when her son complained only mildly of feeling ill: she therefore did nothing for some time. When she finally sent for the doctor, the child was found to have fluid on his lungs; she said later that ‘had I then known the use of the clinical thermometer, which was not yet considered even a desirable instrument … for any mother to use’, she would have recognized the gravity of the illness earlier.⁴⁹

Even something as basic as a hot-water bottle, to keep a sick child warm, was not easily obtainable. ‘Bottles’ were generally made of stone, and corked at the top. Wriggly fretful children had a nasty tendency to kick the corks out, sending scalding water gushing over themselves. ‘Gutta-percha’ bags were available by mid-century, but they were expensive, and so only for the rich.^* The most common method was to heat sand in a pan over the kitchen range and fill cloth bags with it.⁵⁰

      The best solution to illness was to prevent it, all agreed. All also agreed on how this was to be done: a child should lead an orderly, well-regulated daily life, simple in every element. Meals were to be plain and ‘wholesome’ – a wonderful word embodying not only basic nutrition, but also a moral element. In this moral universe food was a danger as well as a benefit: books warned against children being given specific foods – usually strong-tasting ones (especially for girls: such foods were thought to arouse passion, and were troublesome during puberty in particular), though vegetables and fruits could be equally hazardous. It was notable that expensive foods, or ones that tasted good enough to be consumed from desire rather than hunger, were often considered the most unwholesome. Mrs Beeton was not alone in warning of the dangers of fresh bread. Day-old bread was infinitely to be preferred, while ‘Hot rolls, swimming in melted butter … ought to be carefully shunned’ – especially by children, who were to have the most restricted diets. She recommended that suet pastry be made with 5 oz of suet for every pound of flour – although a scant 4 oz would ‘answer very well for children’. Another of her puddings was made with eggs and brandy – unless it was intended for children, when ‘the addition of the latter ingredients СКАЧАТЬ