What Killed Jane Austen?: And Other Medical Mysteries (5 page)

Galton (1822-1911) was an English eccentric, explorer, geographer, author, inventor, meteorologist, anthropologist and statistician. Some have called him the father of modern psychology.

Just before his fifth birthday, he boasted that he could read any English book, say all the Latin active verbs and recite 52 lines of Latin poetry.

He must have been an insufferable brat. An expert later calculated Galton’s IQ at over 200 (but gave Galton’s first cousin Charles Darwin only 135 and Copernicus only 110!).

He studied medicine at Birmingham University and King’s College, London. As a medical student, he proposed that there should be an ‘index of curative skill’ to measure doctors’ merit and to regulate their fee.

He did a statistical study of the efficacy of prayer. Findings: though churchgoers all over Britain prayed every Sunday for the lives of the royal family, the royals did not live longer than others.

Galton dropped medicine when his father’s death gave him an independent income.

In 1850 he set off to explore Syria, Egypt and the Sudan; then vast areas of South West Africa.

Hearing that Hottentots were killing off missionaries, he demoralised their ferocious chief by wearing a pink hunting coat, riding into his doorway on a snorting ox and telling him to stop!

Back in London after covering 2,700 kilometres in two years, Galton became a Fellow of the Royal Society.

He was one of the first to discover that we each have a unique set of fingerprints that do not change with age. After Scotland Yard put Galton in charge of Criminal Investigation, his Fingerprints Branch successfully identified over 100 criminals in six months. Today we still use his system of arches, loops and whorls to classify prints.

He devised a method to decimalise British currency; a method which resembled the one finally adopted in 1971.

At home, he rigged up a signal that told everyone when the lavatory was engaged: ‘It saves a futile climb upstairs and the occupant is not subjected to the embarrassment of having the door rattled.’

Galton often said: ‘Whenever you can, count.’ He saw measurement as the basis of science.

This passion for statistics enabled him to prepare weather charts more accurate than any before; he also discovered and named the anticyclone.

Galton wanted to compare the number of beautiful girls in British cities. First he invented a pocket counter; then he toured the cities pressing the button every time he saw a beauty. London had the highest beauty quotient, while Aberdeen was lowest.

But his life-interest was heredity. We can only speculate whether the infertility of his own marriage spurred this obsession.

His genetic work on peas closely resembled that of Gregor Mendel, though he didn’t then know of Mendel.

Galton was the first to separate the effects of nature and nurture by studying both identical and non-identical twins.

In 1859, Charles Darwin’s
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
spurred Galton to look for ways to improve the human race. The idea was not new. Plato’s
Republic
idealised selective breeding. To prevent the human race from degenerating, Plato urged us to apply to humans the methods of breeders of dogs and birds.

In Galton’s own work
Hereditary Genius
(1869), he concluded from a mountain of statistics that, given a fairly similar environment; most differences in ability are inherited: ‘nature prevails enormously over nurture when the differences of nurture do not exceed what is commonly … found among persons of the same rank of society and in the same country’.

Moreover, Galton believed in one general ability, rather than in specific talents or aptitudes.

When a historian argued that it was their specific specialised abilities that had made Caesar a great commander, Shakespeare a great poet and Newton a great scientist, Galton quoted Samuel Johnson:

No, it is only that one man has more mind than another. He may direct it differently or prefer this study to that. Sir, the man who has vigour may walk to the North as well as to the South, to the East as well as to the West.

Galton argued for selective breeding between healthy people of ability. ‘It would be quite practical to produce a highly gifted race of men [obviously women didn’t get equal attention] by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.’

He urged the state to run competitive exams for hereditary merit, applaud the winners at a public ceremony, celebrate their weddings at Westminster Abbey, and give them grants to encourage their breeding!

There was a downside as well. Galton advised ‘stern compulsion … to prevent the free propagation of the stock of those … seriously afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality and pauperism.’

He coined the term
eugenics
(Greek for ‘good breeding’). In 1907, he founded the Eugenics Education Society, which influenced birth control, abortion reform, sex education, marriage guidance, family allowances and taxation. But Galton did not want revolutionary change. He would have approved of genetic counselling, but he would have been appalled to see eugenic ideas used to defend the Holocaust.

Galton died in 1911, at the age of 88. His estate funded a Chair of Eugenics at University College, London. (GB)

One of the books sent to Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip as a wedding present in 1947 was
Married Love
. It was a gift of the author, Marie Stopes, who in a covering letter said: ‘It seemed best to wait until you were married, and I now send it in the hope that you may be able to read it together.’ It needs some gall to be so presumptuous, and Stopes had plenty of that.

It was hardly surprising that, as with the copies sent years before to Queen Mary (mother of seven) and the by then 10 years widowed Queen Alexandra (five children), the gift elicited no response. Yet since its appearance in 1918 the book has sold well over a million copies and been translated into 13 languages. In 1935 American academics voted it 16th out of the 25 most influential books of the previous 50 years. It was just behind Marx’s
Das Kapital
and just ahead of Einstein’s
Relativity
.

Dr Marie Stopes was a determined, single-minded, querulous and highly intelligent woman whose public behaviour became more eccentric as the years passed.

She was born in Surrey in 1880. She studied botany at University College, London, graduating with first-class honours, and then went on to Munich where she obtained her doctorate. Her speciality was palaeobotany, and she was later to write the definitive work on the constitution of coal. She never had any formal medical training.

As a young woman Marie had a number of suitors, but they were only entertained on a cerebral level; if passion did exist, it was confined to skittish and ebullient correspondence. She did chase one man to Japan, but it came to naught. On the rebound she married a pallid and sensitive fellow-botanist, Ruggles Gates. That was 1911. When they were divorced five years later she was still a virgin.

But she had not completely wasted her time, for during the final arid couple of years she wrote what was to be her best-selling sexual treatise,
Married Love
. In the circumstances it would appear to have been something of a paradox, but maybe it helped set out her yearned-for ideal.

The book was published in March 1918. Three months later she married Humphrey Vernon Roe and finally was able to test theory against reality. The wedding was solemnised by the Bishop of Birmingham, who, in a madcap moment of abstraction, had himself asked for her hand a short time before.

The book was the first ‘sex manual’ in the English language and its mere 116 pages meant that lusty teenagers could easily hold and read it under the bedclothes. Alternatively, it could be folded within the covers of the Anglican prayerbook. At one London club it was in such demand that members were allowed to read it for only an hour at a time.

Today we wonder at its innocent, even puritanical, nature, but then it was dynamite. It spoke of ‘stirring a chaste partner to physical love’. It blamed a wife’s ‘coldness’ on the husband’s ‘want of art’, and called for the ‘profound mutual rousing of passion’. It contained contraceptive advice and extolled the liberation of women from the yoke of childbearing and male insensitivity. Its hitherto unknown free-thinking ethos was heady stuff and ensured the book’s immediate success. It ran to six reprints in six months.

Dr Stopes became a national figure with a vast correspondence, much of which revealed the depth of sexual misery and prejudice within the population. Clergymen featured large among the letter writers. An Essex vicar wrote about his frigid wife: ‘She is slow to rouse, once or twice a year … I am afraid I bore her … Single lust is a feeble squib; I want fireworks.’ One from Gosport: ‘If I have touched my wife near the entrance she is much more “lively” … I feel dreadful having written so frankly.’ Another from Newark: ‘how best to arouse … my Wife always lies with her back to me, I make a “tender advance” … and the end of the poetry is “I do not like your breath on my face”.’

A comi-tragedy unfurled, which was sometimes leavened by missives from the likes of the ubiquitous ‘Disgusted’. One such with nine children angrily wrote: ‘If God sends the babies, he will also send their breeches.’

Perhaps the most poignant was from a Yorkshireman who wrote about alternative methods of contraception. For him it amounted to ‘rubbing “stuff” out of penis by hand of either self, wife or a middle aged widowed cook in absence of wife’. The mind boggles.

The medical profession was divided. Apart from obstetrics, sexual physiology was not taught at medical school; indeed there was precious little to teach. Knowledge of hormones was in its infancy, and all, including Stopes, thought the ‘safe’ period was in the middle of the month—we now know that this is, in fact, the most fertile period.

To the profession’s amused contempt Stopes opened a birth-control clinic in 1921, mainly fitting cervical caps. It made a slow start but enough to outrage the Catholic Church, which intensified the scorn and vilification it had heaped upon her for the previous three years.

Though she had been denounced as immoral, Stopes held her hand. Then Dr Sutherland, a staunch Catholic, wrote that she was conducting ‘a monstrous campaign of harmful methods’ (cervical cap), and ‘a class conspiracy against the poor’.

Although Sutherland’s words were mild when compared with the usual abuse, she snapped and sued for libel. Sutherland won, but obtained a derisory £200 damages. Stopes appealed and the judgment was reversed. The Catholic Church was not to be denied, however, and appealed to the House of Lords inviting monetary contributions from ‘right minded people’. Three of the five Law Lords were over 80 years of age, and Stopes lost 4-1. Sales of
Married Love
reached the half million mark.

Over the next 20 years Dr Stopes undertook numerous other legal battles with varying success. She also wrote two more big sellers,
Wise Parenthood
and
Radiant Motherhood
(both before her only child was born), but
Married Love
stands supreme.

She and her second husband became estranged after 10 troubled years of marriage. She treated her son, Harry, in a bizarre way, not allowing him to read until he was 10, forcing him to have only carrots in the morning, and dressing him in knitted frocks so as not to interfere with the growth of his genitals. In the end mother and son fell out and she cut him out of her will.

Although she was certain she would live to be 120, Marie Stopes died in 1958, aged 78. While regarded by many as paranoid and/or a deluded megalomaniac, it was the very nature of her overdrawn personality and unappeasable pugnacity which allowed the emotive subject of sex to be thrust into the full sunshine for the first time. It remains there today.

(JL)

I was supposed to get married … to justify my existence
(Elizabeth Kenny)

How can we explain this woman who was called both a fraud and a medical genius, a cheap quack and an unhappy martyr, a raging old tiger and a merciful angel?
(Victor Cohn)

Elizabeth Kenny was born in Warialda, New South Wales, in 1880. After several moves, the family settled on the Darling Downs in Queensland.

She planned to work as a missionary in India, but at 33, she became a volunteer nurse in a local maternity hospital. Next she was an unpaid visiting bush nurse in Queensland, by necessity often acting also as doctor and midwife.

In 1911, when Kenny was 31, she saw a feverish girl aged two, who was paralysed in one arm and both legs. By telegraph, Kenny consulted her friend Dr Aeneas McDonnell, who could only advise: ‘Infantile paralysis (polio). No known treatment. Do the best you can … ’

Kenny tried poultices without result, so she applied bits of blanket soaked in hot water. Soon she started moving the paralysed limbs and also encouraged the girl herself to try to move them. Moving limbs affected by polio was medical heresy, but Kenny did the same with five other children. Dr McDonnell was surprised to hear that all did well.

In 1915, she enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces. From Nurse, she rose to Staff-Nurse, and later to Sister. While serving in France, she herself was wounded, and won a British War Medal.

After the war, Kenny returned to bush nursing. According to the accepted teaching of the day, since polio weakened affected muscles, these weak muscles needed splinting. Without splinting, people believed, the unaffected strong muscles would pull the weak ones out of place. Doctors ‘knew’ all this. With her usual total confidence, Elizabeth Kenny disagreed: ‘No, I see only tight, shortened muscles in spasm—your splints and casts are illogical; throw them out.’

She invented and patented a stretcher that enabled people in shock to receive treatment while being transported.