What was the standard of care during the period?
Born in 1819, Queen Victoria — one of the longest-reigning British monarchs — lived for 81 years; however, many contemporaneous women were not as lucky. Constrained by inadequate healthcare and poverty, the average woman born in 1820 lived around a measly forty years. The Victorian Era (1837-1901), similar to other periods, was dichotomous. It was an epoch of wondrous innovation and crude primitivity, especially in medicine.
If sick during the era, your doctors and pharmacists probably subjected you to a concoction of herbs. According to Dr. George Szasz of the BC Medical Journal, "Herbalists held an important role in informing doctors and pharmacists of the medicinal values of plants and their sources." Medicine and phlebotomy, the removal of blood from a patient, were stubbornly interdependent. If fatigued by anemia, gastroenteritis, diabetes, cholera, or any disease, bloodletting by leeches was the unifying cure. Although misapplied and its effects thoroughly disproved, leeches maintained popularity amongst those who did not afford comprehensive care. Other questionable methods of amelioration include the prescription of opium and cocaine. While also used recreationally, doctors and users paraded the latter drug as pain relief. Neurologically, cocaine impedes axonal propagation, the transmission of electrical signals responsible for processing pain. It was a remarkable alternative to chloroform and functioned as a topical anesthetic for toothaches and surgery, which was also due for revamping.
Good hygiene was, unfortunately, not commonplace until the late century, and hospitals were rife with amputations. During the early Victorian Era, Robert Liston, a young doctor, routinely cut and sliced his patients with an alacrity never seen before. Unusually tall for the time (6'2 as opposed to the average 5'6), Liston could "remove a leg in less than 30 seconds," according to an Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) blog post. The direness of a patient's condition compounded with crude science also made for messy situations. In one instance, Dr. Eric Erichsen, who at the time, was the head of London's University College Hospital, made a slit in a woman's throat and suctioned with his mouth puss and blood to promote her breathing.
Nonetheless, the period was not entirely backward. The establishment of sewers and vaccines gradually diminished the ravages of cholera and typhoid in the cities. Louis Pasteur would find a correlation between germs and disease, revolutionizing medical sanitation, and simultaneous social reform bolstered such public health revolutions. Many declarations, including the Public Health Act of 1848, would further improve working-class conditions, and within less than a century, X-rays, aspirin, the first electric hearing aid, open-heart surgery, and a broader knowledge of disease developed.
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