The Regency World’s View of Viruses
Diane Morris | Wednesday, March 21st, 2018 | Medicine, Regency Research | No Comments
This year’s flu epidemic has been extremely challenging, with a high number of hospitalizations and flu-related deaths. The influenza or flu is caused by a virus, a teeny, tiny infectious agent smaller than a bacterium, as can be seen in the illustration below. The word “virus” is derived from the Latin word vīrus, which means poison; […]
Read More »Rev. Mr. Bate Dudley Accused of Crim. Con.
Diane Morris | Wednesday, August 16th, 2017 | Marriage, Regency Research | 2 Comments
For seven or eight years I have been downloading and reading books published during the Regency era—by which I mean the “long” Regency era running from about 1780 (before the French Revolution) to 1830 (the year King George IV died). Books published during these years provide the background information for my Regency-era novels. Occasionally, when […]
Read More »Somerset House: Two Lives on the Thames
Diane Morris | Friday, November 25th, 2016 | Public Buildings | No Comments
Somerset House on London’s Thames River offers quite a few architectural oddities, at least for someone like me who is attracted to Neoclassical architecture but has never read much about it. When my husband and I were in London last year we took 25 photos of the façade of this 18th-century building. We were both entranced by its […]
Read More »Vade Mecum Books: Handy Regency-Era Guides
Diane Morris | Thursday, October 20th, 2016 | Medicine, Regency Research, Surgery | No Comments
Like Jane Austen, I love novels. In recent weeks I’ve read Jane and The Wandering Eye (the third book in Stephanie Barron’s Jane Austen mystery series); A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman; We Were Liars by e. lockhart; Warleggan, book 4 in Winston Graham’s Poldark series; and Daphne du Maurier’s romantic thriller My Cousin Rachel. Occasionally I return […]
Read More »Fanny Burney and the Seven Men in Black
Diane Morris | Thursday, October 6th, 2016 | Surgery | 2 Comments
Last Friday, September 30, 2016, was the 205th anniversary of Fanny Burney’s mastectomy—without anesthesia. Here’s her story. “Yet—when the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast—cutting through veins—arteries—flesh—nerves—I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision …”1 Writing from Paris to […]
Read More »1783 and 1816: Two Spectacular Weather Years
Diane Morris | Thursday, September 22nd, 2016 | Regency Research, Science | No Comments
Lately I’ve been thinking about the weather. For one thing, it’s hot as blue blazes here in East Tennessee. The cicada chirping has ceased, thus bringing an end to the dog days of summer, but it remains hot and dry, despite the fact that today is the first day of fall (or autumn, as they say in […]
Read More »Matthew Flinders: A Regency Officer Remembered Today
Diane Morris | Thursday, September 8th, 2016 | Life & Times, Regency Research | No Comments
Recently I happened to be perusing the 1816 volume of The Gentleman’s Magazine. I was photocopying the meteorological tables, beginning with March, so that I would have a sense of the weather conditions for the months in which several characters in my new novel are encountering unexpected headwinds. In most issues, the weather tables appear just […]
Read More »Regency-Era Heresy over the Cause of Childbed Fever
Diane Morris | Thursday, August 18th, 2016 | Childbirth, Medicine | No Comments
“You are all familiar with Dr. Chipman’s aphorism, ‘The process of parturition is the same in the countess as in the cow.’ Very true, but, unfortunately, the results are infinitely better in the cow than in the countess.” — Karl M. Wilson, M.D.1 Dr. Wilson published his comment about countesses and cows in 1936. He lamented […]
Read More »Childbed Fever: How Many Regency Women Died?
Diane Morris | Thursday, August 4th, 2016 | Childbirth, Medicine | No Comments
“A deep, dark and continuous stream of mortality.”—William Farr, 18761 Most medical practitioners in England’s Regency era believed that miasma caused puerperal or childbed fever. The miasma was believed to arrive on foul-smelling air, to emanate from clothing and furniture, or to be given off by a woman’s body itself. It seemed to be cured with emetics that made patients […]
Read More »Treating a Regency Case of Childbed Fever
Diane Morris | Thursday, July 21st, 2016 | Childbirth, Medicine | No Comments
My previous blog posts examined the supposed causes of childbed fever as they were understood in late 18th-century England, when Jane Austen was a teenager, and also the treatments prescribed to manage the symptoms of this often fatal disease. In reading various books on midwifery and childbed fever published in the late 1700s and early 1800s, […]
Read More »