What Killed Jane Austen?: And Other Medical Mysteries (4 page)

Historians would love to get a look at Henry VIII to confirm or refute the syphilis legend. He lies in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, but nobody has had the nerve to ask Queen Elizabeth II for permission. Idle curiosity is not perhaps a good enough reason to go fossicking about among her ancestors. However, when Queen Victoria gave permission to survey the tombs in Westminster Abbey, the burial place of James I of England (James VI of Scotland) was rediscovered. He died in 1625 and nestles in with Henry VII, who died in 1509.

Charles I was beheaded with a single stroke in 1649. His body was embalmed and placed on public display for a week. It was then taken to Windsor and placed next to Henry VIII (who had died in 1547) in a space which that king had left for his sixth wife, Catherine Parr. The snag was that she had remarried after Henry’s death and so was beyond the pale as far as sharing eternity with her former husband was concerned, and so she is buried elsewhere.

Following his spectacular denouement, Charles lay undisturbed with Henry until 1813 when workmen preparing a tomb (seven years too early!) for George III accidentally broke into his grave. The Prince Regent was informed, and together with the royal physician, Sir Henry Halford, he rushed round to take a look.

A decayed wooded coffin was found inside a lead one. A small opening was made and the shroud torn away. The skin was dark but the musculature of the face remained and the famous ‘Van Dyke’ beard was intact. He was easily recognised from contemporary paintings.

The head, of course, was loose and when held up to view it was seen that the hair on the neck had been cropped. The neatly severed fourth cervical vertebra was smooth, even and awesome.

Charles was returned to his resting place, but when all had been resealed, the severed vertebra was found to have been left out. Halford kept it, had it mounted and used it as a saltcellar. It remained in the family until 1888 when it was returned to Queen Victoria. She had it put in a suitably engraved tiny casket and lowered through a small hole in the chapel floor onto the top of the coffin where it still is.

Oliver Cromwell died of natural causes in 1658 (probably malaria, then endemic in England) and was buried in Westminster Abbey. At the Restoration in 1660, his body was dug up and hung at Tyburn, the execution ground near the present day Marble Arch.

The next day his head was hacked off, the body, buried at the foot of the gallows and his head taken to Westminster Hall, where it was displayed on a spike until 1684. It then blew down in a gale and was retrieved by a guard, who smuggled it home. Eventually sold by this man’s daughter, it passed through several hands until left in a Canon Wilkinson’s will to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

It was displayed from time to time and was last seen publicly in 1911 at the Royal Archaeological Institute. This irreverent gorping was then considered unseemly and after much debate it was buried by the college in 1960. To avoid student pranks this took place at a secret location.

Between the years 1683 and 1710, Queen Anne had 17 pregnancies. All but one were stillborn—even the survivor, William, died in 1700 at the age of 12—and child after child was lovingly enclosed in winding sheets and placed in the tomb of Mary Queen of Scots in Westminster Abbey.

The tragic Queen Mary had been buried at Peterborough in 1587, but in 1612 was reinterred at Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster by her son, James I. Her fine sarcophagus became the repository of numerous fringe royals. When it was opened in 1867, besides Mary herself and that pitiful roll call of Anne’s offspring, there were found her own natural son, John Darnley; her grandson, Henry; her grand-daughter, Elizabeth of Bohemia; her great grandson, Prince Rupert; Lady Arabella Stuart; and sundry illegitimate children of the libertine James II of England (VII of Scotland).

Is it in the interest of science or for mere curiosity that medical historians would so love to have one last peek in these tombs? As things are, the authorities think the latter. Pity!

(JL)

For a woman to succeed in a man’s world, she has to be twice as good as a man. Luckily, this is not too hard!
(Anonymous)

About 1795, a daughter was born to the Barry family in London. For some reason, it was an aunt and uncle who raised her. The latter, a well-known painter, James Barry, believed in encouraging both males and females to achieve their potential. But this gem of an uncle died when the girl was only 11. She took her love of learning from him, and also his given name.

At 15, ‘James’ and the aunt moved to Edinburgh, where she passed herself off as a male to join the University Medical School. No way could she have done so as a female; that milestone was still over half a century away.

Though fellow-students teased her about her slight build and hairless chin, she kept her secret safe. Her only close friend wanted to teach James to box, but she learnt the rapier instead.

At 17, she completed a brilliant thesis on hernias. At the early age of 20, she gained her MD by defending this thesis against interrogation by the whole faculty, and by discussing two of Hippocrates’ Aphorisms. Much of this, of course, was in Latin!

In 1813, she somehow avoided the usual physical examination, satisfied the Army Medical Board, and started on her lifetime career in military medicine.

Soon she distinguished herself at the Battle of Waterloo.

Next she coped well with a cholera epidemic at Cape Town. There she also saved a mother and child by performing a Caesarean delivery. Well before the time of antiseptics and anaesthetics, this was an exceptional outcome. Soon she rose to become private physician to the governor of Cape Town.

Wearing high-heeled boots and satin waistcoats with padded shoulders, James won the favour of many ladies. Since she excelled at duels, the men didn’t dare rib her about her high voice or the little dog she always kept with her.

By 1821, as colonial medical inspector, James was able to raise the level of medical care. For example, she decreed that only physicians or apothecaries should prescribe drugs, saying: ‘Pedlars and hawkers of drugs … do more real injury … than the most virulent diseases.’ She also drafted the enlightened
Rules for the General Treatment of Lepers
and complained to the governor about floggings at the prison.

Naturally such a stirrer made enemies. Headstrong and quarrelsome, James herself often went to prison for breaches of discipline, but never for long.

In 1845, aged 50, she got the dreaded yellow fever. James forbade her colleagues from calling on her, and asked that if she did die, she should be buried fully dressed. But her assistant did visit while she was delirious and saw that James was no man. When James came to, she swore her assistant to secrecy.

After a year’s sick leave she returned to duty. During the Crimean War, 400 of the 500 wounded in her hospital recovered; another exceptional result. At 62, as inspector general of all British Army Hospitals in Canada, she worked to improve the food, water and hygiene in her camps.

When she died at 71, they found on the bedpost the sheet she had worn to flatten her breasts. Her unsuspecting valet had served her for 40 years.

Had the army followed her request for instant burial in a sack, James would have taken her secret with her to the grave. But they called in a charwoman to lay out the body. She was furious: ‘What do you mean by calling me to lay out a general, and the corpse is a woman’s, and one who has borne a child?’

The army authorities continued the deception; both her death certificate and her tombstone show her as a male. But there were many red faces at the War Office when her obituary appeared in the
Manchester Guardian
:

Officers … may remember … Dr Barry … enjoy[ed] a reputation for Considerable skill … in difficult operations. This gentleman had entered the army in 1813 … passed through the grades of assistant surgeon and surgeon in various regiments … Upon his death, [he] was discovered to be a woman.

Over 80 years later the
Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps
gave her a fitting epitaph:

Whoever was ‘James Barry’ she has the distinction of being first—the first woman doctor of the British Isles. Secondly—one who has … served her country in all climates with distinction, and if she preferred to do so by the only way available in her lifetime, by assuming the trappings of the male sex, all the more credit to her courage and pertinacity.

If James Barry was the first known female medical graduate in the English-speaking world, albeit a status gained and maintained in heavy and lifelong disguise, who were the true believers who slugged it out with the medical establishment to gain the first legitimate toehold for women in the medical profession?

Elizabeth Blackwell, an American graduate of British birth, is regarded as being the very first.

The Blackwells were a middle-class family from Bristol, England. Elizabeth’s father, Samuel, a sugar-factory owner, was a religious man and held unfashionable ideas on equality in education and independence for both sons and daughters. She herself was born in 1821, the third of what were to be eight surviving children. When Elizabeth was 11 years old, financial disaster overtook her father, and the family migrated to New York. Samuel died a bankrupt when Elizabeth was 17, whereupon she and her sisters opened a school and paid off the debts.

Although there had never been a female medical graduate in America, she was determined to become a doctor, partly to fulfil her father’s ambition, partly to right the wrong a friend had suffered—the friend had died from a uterine disorder as she would not seek advice from a (male) doctor—and partly to satisfy an urge in her feisty nature to do the impossible.

After 29 colleges had refused her application, Geneva College in New York State agreed to take her. The faculty had initially refused her application, but agreed to refer it to the student body, stipulating that any decision regarding admission must be unanimous. The students foresaw entertainment and notoriety, and voted ‘yes’—with one exception, and he was sat upon until he changed his mind.

Miss Blackwell did the then usual two-year course, graduating as best student in 1849, and by so doing she seems to have set a pattern of excellence that women in medicine have found difficult to shake off since. Nonetheless, at her graduation ceremony she declined to walk in the academic procession ‘because it would not be ladylike’. Her success inspired the English humorous journal
Punch
to publish some congratulatory verses to ‘Doctrix Blackwell’.

Although she was well received, almost feted, in New York, it was more as a freak than as a serious medical doctor, and openings did not present themselves. Elizabeth went to the more liberated Paris, but found that she could only get a job as a midwife. At work she contracted an inflammation of the eyes, which was diagnosed as gonococcal ophthalmia. In June 1850 the affected eye was excised, leaving shattered any thoughts of her being a surgeon.

Dr Blackwell was welcomed in London. At St Bartholomew’s Hospital she was able to work in every department
except
gynaecology!

On her return to America she was refused every post at every hospital to which she applied. She began to lecture on ‘The Laws of Life’, became known about town and steadily built up a large private practice, mainly of young and indigent women. Ultimately she opened a hospital staffed entirely by women.

In 1869 she moved permanently to England, and in the teeth of great opposition helped found the London School of Medicine for Women (later the Royal Free). For a short time Elizabeth Blackwell was its professor of gynaecology.

Dr Blackwell never married but did adopt a seven-year-old orphan, Kitty Barry (no relative to her enigmatic predecessor).

Elizabeth Blackwell continued to write on medical issues throughout her life, eventually dying in Hastings in 1910 aged 89. Kitty died in 1936.

The first female medical student in Australia was Dagmar Berne, who enrolled at Sydney University in 1885. There seems to have been no overt hostility from male staff or students and she completed the four-year course without incident. Then she blew her chance of becoming Australia’s first registered female doctor by electing to transfer to Great Britain to pass out as a Licentiate of the College of Physicians of Glasgow and Edinburgh and Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries of London. Dr Berne returned to Sydney in 1895, practised briefly and died of tuberculosis in 1900 aged 34.

Adelaide University enrolled Laura Fowler as its first woman medical student in 1886. She graduated in 1891, but did not register until March 1892, again thereby denying herself the unique honour of being number one on the register. Nonetheless, Dr Fowler had a long and eventful life, including missionary work in India and being held prisoner in Serbia in the First World War. She died in 1958.

At Melbourne University, no less than seven women enrolled as medical students in 1887. All eventually graduated, but the first two (in 1891) were Clara Stone and Margaret Whyte. They went on the register at once, thereby pipping Laura Fowler at the post and have their names writ large in the history of Australian medicine.

Today in Australia there are more female than male medical graduates.

(GB & JL)

He was a rough-cut genius, a pioneer who moved from one new field to the next, applying methods developed in one to problems in another, often without rigor, yet usually with striking effectiveness (Daniel J. Kevles)

The Art of Travel
(1855) by Sir Francis Galton was full of handy tips. If you were a long way from home and feeling under the weather, just drop a charge of gunpowder into warm soapy water and glug it down.

Sore feet? Blisters? Just make a lather of soapsuds inside your socks, and break a raw egg into each boot to soften the leather. You want to keep your only set of clothes dry when it rains? Take them off and sit on them!