Bücher der Reihe Victorian Life and Times

Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England is a human story of medicine in 19th-century England. It's a story of how a diverse and competitive assortment of apothecary apprentices, surgeons who learned their trade by doing, and physicians schooled in ancient Greek medicine but lacking in any actual experience with patients, was gradually formed into a medical profession with uniform standards of education and qualification. It's a story of how medical men struggled with "e;new"e; diseases such as cholera and "e;old"e; ones known for centuries, such as tuberculosis, syphilis, and smallpox, largely in the absence of effective drugs or treatments, and so were often reduced to standing helplessly by as their patients died. It's a story of how surgeons, empowered first by anesthesia and later by antiseptic technique, vastly expanded the field of surgery-sometimes with major benefits for patients, but sometimes with disastrous results. Above all, it's a story of how gender and class ideology dominated both practitioners and patients. Women were stridently excluded from medical education and practice of any kind until the end of the century, but were hailed into the new field of nursing, which was felt to be "e;natural"e; to the gentler sex. Only the poor were admitted to hospitals until the last decades of the century, and while they often received compassionate care, they were also treated as "e;cases"e; of disease and experimented upon with freedom. Yet because medical knowledge was growing by leaps and bounds, Victorians were fascinated with this new field and wrote novels, poetry, essays, letters, and diaries, which illuminate their experience of health and disease for us. Newly developed techniques of photography, as well as improved print illustrations, help us to picture this fascinating world. This vivid history of Victorian medicine is enriched with many literary examples and visual images drawn from the period.

The experiences of children growing up in Britain during Victorian times are often misunderstood to be either idyllic or wretched. Yet, the reality was more wide-ranging than most imagine. Here, in colorful detail and with firsthand accounts, Frost paints a complete picture of Victorian childhood that illustrates both the difficulties and pleasures of growing up during this period. Differences of class, gender, region, and time varied the lives of children tremendously. Boys had more freedom than girls, while poor children had less schooling and longer working lives than their better-off peers. Yet some experiences were common to almost all children, including parental oversight, physical development, and age-based transitions. This compelling work concentrates on marking out the strands of life that both separated and united children throughout the Victorian period.Most historians of Victorian children have concentrated on one class or gender or region, or have centered on arguments about how much better off children were by 1900 than 1830. Though this work touches on these themes, it covers all children and focuses on the experience of childhood rather than arguments about it. Many people hold myths about Victorian families. The happy myth is that childhood was simpler and happier in the past, and that families took care of each other and supported each other far more than in contemporary times. In contrast, the unhappy myth insists that childhood in the past was brutal-full of indifferent parents, high child mortality, and severe discipline at home and school. Both myths had elements of truth, but the reality was both more complex and more interesting. Here, the author uses memoirs and other writings of Victorian children themselves to challenge and refine those myths.

In contemporary culture, the near obsessive pursuit of love and monogamous bliss is considered "e;normal,"e; as evidenced by a wide range of online dating sites, television shows such as Sex in the City and The Bachelorette, and an endless stream of Hollywood romantic comedies. Ironically, when it comes to love and marriage, we still wrestle with many of the same emotional and social challenges as our 19th-century predecessors did over 100 years ago.Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England draws on little-known conduct books, letter-writing manuals, domestic guidebooks, periodical articles, letters, and novels to reveal what the period equivalents of "e;dating"e; and "e;tying the knot"e; were like in the Victorian era. By addressing topics such as the etiquette of introductions and home visits, the roles of parents and chaperones, the events of the London season, model love letters, and the specific challenges facing domestic servants seeking spouses, author Jennifer Phegley provides a fascinating examination of British courtship and marriage rituals among the working, middle, and upper classes from the 1830s to the 1910s.

Victorian Needlework explores these ubiquitous pastimes-their practice and their meaning in women's lives. Covering the period from 1837-1901, the book looks specifically at the crafts themselves examining quilting, embroidery, crochet, knitting, and more. It discusses required skills and the techniques women used as well as the technological innovations that influenced needlework during this period of rapid industrialization.This book is unique in its comprehensive treatment of the topic ranging across class, time, and technique. Readers will learn what needlework meant to "e;ladies,"e; for whom it was a hobby reflecting refinement and femininity, and discover what such skills could mean as a "e;suitable"e; way for a woman to make a living, often through grueling labor. Such insights are illustrated throughout with examples from women's periodicals, needlework guides, pattern books, and personal memoirs that bring the period to life for the modern reader.