Free If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley Page A

to thehaemorrhoidal veins, & draw 9 or 10 ounces of blood’. (Ouch.)

    This doctor is about to use his enormous syringe to administer an enema. The patient in the bed looks suitably nervous
    There were constant new fads. For once the English were ahead of the stylish French when Liselotte, Duchess of Orléans, described in 1714 a novelty from our side of the Channel: ‘a purge which was so effective that I had to retire to my closestool no less than thirty times’. The purge was ‘a new medicine, but so à la mode that all Paris is using it now. It is a salt from England called here du sel d’Epsom . You dissolve it in water.’ Even the prudish Queen Victoria took a purge once a week, and the Victorians were enthusiastic users of laxatives at levels not to be seen again until the protein-based Atkins diet suddenly became popular in Britain in the early years of the twenty-first century. (Atkins enthusiasts cut down on vegetables, decreasing their fibre intake and often suffering from constipation in consequence.) The author of a book for pregnant women published in 1853 set much store by the state of a woman’s bowels: ‘If pregnant females, who suffer from constipation,’ he wrote, ‘were to take small doses of castor oil, twice or thrice a week… difficult cases of labour would very rarely occur.’ For their enemas, the Victorians dropped the rectally damaging syringe, which had held sway since the seventeenth century, in favour of the pipe and squeeze-bag.

    ‘Cutting for the stone.’ Samuel Pepys underwent the operation to remove a stone from his bladder in his own home
    Even while the medical profession was becoming established, the bedroom at home remained the scene of many a crisis. When Samuel Pepys, for example, had a stone in his bladder removed, his surgeon came to his house to perform the operation. The preparations took place in his own bedchamber. He was tied down on a table so that he could not thrash about, and two strong men were also present to ‘hold him by the knees’ and ‘by the arm-holes’.
    With the Enlightenment, though, the bedchamber began to lose its role as an operating theatre. Those in need began to turn to the professionals. There were physicians who would still visit you at home for a fee, but also surgeons who could perform operations in their own shops, and apothecaries and chemists who could sell you herbal remedies and drugs from commercial premises. Early hospitals (places for the provision of hospitality)were mainly places for the relief of the poor and indigent, rather than for curing the middle and upper classes. So on into the nineteenth century a professional nurse might still arrive to help a wealthy family with a sick member turn a bedroom into a sickroom. Eventually, though, by the twentieth century, illness became firmly associated with the surgery and hospital. Today, the very idea of a doctor making a ‘home visit’ sounds unusual and retrograde: it seems like a practice from a more leisurely past.
    Medical drama in the bedroom is much rarer than it used to be. Now that 58 per cent of us take our last breath in a hospital, we’ve forgotten that once everyone expected to die at home.

7 – Sex
Would you rather sin with Elinor Glyn on a tiger skin?
Or would you prefer to err with her on some other kind of fur?
    Verses on Lord Curzon’s lover, romantic
novelist Elinor Glyn, 1864–1943
    We tend to assume, along with Philip Larkin, that ‘Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three … Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles’ first LP.’ There was a curious reluctance to talk about sex for well over a century, between 1800 and 1960. Yet before that copulation was openly discussed, with much less stigma and shame.
    Nor was sex restricted to the bedroom. Edmund Harrold, a priapic wig-maker living in late-Stuart Manchester, kept a detailed diary of his sex life, including comments such as ‘did wife 2 tymes couch & bed in an hour an[d] ½