Health & Medicine

The 19th century was not a time in which one would want to become sick. In the medical world, there were four types of doctors.

The highest on the medical totem pole was the Physician. In the early half of the century physicians made up a tiny handful of doctors in practice. Most were concentrated in London, where there was a greater chance of finding a patient of wealth and standing.

The only jobs of a physician were merely to dispense drugs and do very simple physical exams. To become a physician, you had to have gone to the Royal College of Physicians and gone to Oxford or Cambridge. The real eye-opener of 19th century medicine is that the licensing exam given by the Royal College of Physicians required applicants to interpret 1st and 17th century medical texts. Until 1819, the fellowship exam was entirely in Latin. To be a physician was to be a gentleman, and anything that hinted of manual labor was not gentlemanly.

The jobs that involved manual labor were given to the Surgeon, the next step below the physician. These were the men who cut people open and dealt with fractures, skin diseases, venereal disease, eye problems, in short, anything for which the physician could not simply write a prescription.

Another reason, besides that the job involved manual labor, that the surgeon was below the physician, was that until 1833, surgeons got the bodies they learned anatomy on from graveyards, sometimes by rather shifty means.

The lowest profession on the medical totem was the Apothecary. His job was to mix prescriptions for physicians, but in areas where there were no physicians, they began to offer advice, too. This was the poor man's doctor.

As the century wore on, the boundaries between physician and surgeon began to blur, and apothecaries slowly disappeared. This casual rise of the General Practitioner, or G.P. was to change the face of medicine forever. This was the doctor that you called whether you had pneumonia or a broken leg. These were some of the first doctors to carry about the famous doctor's bag, because they, unlike physicians who carried very little, or surgeons who did not make house calls but instead had their patients come to the hospital, had to carry all their instruments with them at all times.

General Practitioners knew their medicines but did not mix them, that was the chemist's job, and they knew enough about surgery to get by. If a case was too serious however, such as a compound fracture, a surgeon was called in. The G.P. was an increasingly influential figure in the English medical world.

Disease

Without disease, there would be no doctors, and in the 19th century there was plenty of it. One of the more common diseases was cholera. Cholera made its first appearance at Sunderland in 1831, but until well into the 1860's it was frequently epidemic. In 1845 it was made illegal to dump trash and waste into the streets, but this had only a marginal effect.

Ill-ventilated working conditions frequently caused outbreaks of bronchitis and tuberculosis. In 1864 the Factory Act legislated against dirty, ill-ventilated factory premises, but the next year, new epidemics of typhus, smallpox and cholera raged. The inspection of all merchant seamen was made mandatory to prevent against scurvy.

Sanitation

In 1866 the Public Health Act was passed which extended the range of local authorities empowered to compel adequate house drainage, proper water supplies, and to enforce sanitary works in any house or lodgings, not only the poorest. But with all their efforts, in 1869, large parts of Birmingham and Manchester still lacked water sewage and the London water supply was officially described as "of a quality that displays a criminal indifference to the public safety".

Death Rituals

With all this disease in the 19th century, death and early death was no stranger to the English family. Victorians loved to weep over lingering demises and made a big production of them in every respect.

The ritual began even before death. The ringing of a 'passing bell' in the parish church was the signal that the person lay on their death bed. This was pealed six times for a woman and nine times for a man (the famous 'nine tailors').

This was followed by a peal for each year of the person's life. A large funeral was usually held, with everyone in black, unless the deceased was a child or young, unmarried girl, when the color was white. Then the dead were mourned for a specifically prescribed amount of time. This mostly affected the clothes that the widowed could wear and whether they could have fun or not.

Men had it easy. All the had to wear was a black arm band. Women, on the other hand, had to dress all in black. The loss of a husband or wife was mourned for two years, parents or children for one, a brother, sister, or grandparent for six months, and an aunt or uncle for three months.

Queen Victoria wore mourning clothes from 1861, when her Prince Albert died, to her death in 1901, forty years later.