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What was health like in the 19th century - gnr

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At the hospital they were provided with food and a bed but received a limited amount of treatment. Despite this, these hospitals were seen as a vast improvement on the dark and dirty facilities of the 18th century.

Medical professionals understood the need for a window in each room and to keep the rooms clean and well-aired, having learnt from the rapid spread of diseases in the past. Since then, hospitals have changed even more.

Advances in science have helped medical professionals to understand germs and how they are spread, which has translated into how hospitals are designed. The increasing demand for the services of hospitals has also meant that they need to be highly efficient. As the size of hospitals has increased so dramatically since the 19th century, it is no longer possible for every single room to have a window.

Designers must instead work to make rooms bright and airy through air conditioning and central heating controls. Architects also use significantly better quality materials today, such as non-slip surfaces and easy-to-clean plastic flooring to help maintain the high levels of hygiene needed in a hospital facility. Early 20th century hospitals were significantly larger and had long corridors, meaning that doctors and nurses had to walk miles each day just to reach their patients. As a result, hospital designers have taken into account important factors such as the distance between accident and emergency facilities and operation rooms, making sure that all the necessary units are located close together.

There were no obstetricians or gynecologists to assist women through pregnancy and labor like recent times. Midwifes were very popular and imperative in the 19 th century.

They were present at most births in the American colonies doing so out of the establishment of their own home. They developed these skills from Great Britain, who were more medically informed. Women from West Africa that were slaves in America assisted the birth of women both white and black in the south.

In after the Emancipation Proclamation was passed, black women still presented midwifery tendencies while still caring for women of color and also white women. This only took place in the rural parts of the south. Midwives had very crucial experiences delivering babies considering sometimes neither the baby or mother made it through labor. Anesthesia was discovered in and used during child birth which relieved some pain from labor for mothers and made the process easier for midwives.

With the discovery of anesthesia in , this caused a rally in America deeming that there was at least something that could help treat all the diseases that were circulating. Both of these professions have the same goal, but they also serve a different purpose. Physicians are medical care professionals who help patient in a radical and medically treated form.

On the other hand, surgeons are professionals who do hands on work in order to make a patient healthy.

During this time period surgeons had the easier way since anesthesia had been discovered which made the process of surgery better. Roughly one quarter of all children died in the first year at the end of Victoria's reign as at the beginning, and maternal mortality showed no decline. In some fields, however, survival rates improved and mortality statistics slowly declined.

Thus crude death rates fell from Here, the main factors were public hygiene and better nutrition thanks to higher earnings - that is, prevention rather than cure. Although doctors made much of their medicines with Latin names and measured doses, effective remedies were few, and chemical pharmacology as it is known in only began at the end of the Victorian era.

From the s animal thyroid extract was used for various complaints including constipation and depression, while from animal testicular extracts were deployed in pursuit of rejuvenation and miracle cures.

At the same date aspirin was developed to replace traditional opiate painkillers. As a result, many conditions remained chronic or incurable. These limitations, together with the relatively high cost of medical attendance, led to the rise or extension of alternative therapies including homeopathy, naturopathy 'herbal remedies' , hydropathy water cures , mesmerism hypnotism and galvanism electric therapy as well as blatant fraudulence through the promotion of useless pills, powders and coloured liquids.

From notions that disease was caused and cured by mental or spiritual power alone were circulated by the Christian Science movement. Another highly popular fashion was that of phrenology, which claimed to identify temperamental characteristics such as aggression or lust 'amativeness' by means of lumps and bumps on the individual skull, and facial physiognomy.

Psychology itself retained largely traditional concepts such 'melancholic' and 'choleric' tendencies, but in the term 'psychiatry' was coined to denote medical treatment of disabling mental conditions, which were generally held to have hereditary causes.

The Victorian period witnessed an impressive growth in the classification and isolation or strictly the concentration of the insane and mentally impaired in large, strictly regulated lunatic asylums outside major cities, where women and men were legally incarcerated, usually for life. Opened in , the Colney Hatch Asylum in Middlesex housed patients. Wealthier families made use of private care, in smaller establishments.

Regarded at the time as progressive and humane, mental policies and asylum practices now seem almost as cruel as the earlier punitive regimes.

Men and women were housed in separate wards and put to different work, most devoted to supply and service within the asylum. The use of mechanical restraints such as manacles and muzzles was steadily phased out in favour of 'moral management', although solitary confinement and straitjackets continued to be used. By the end of the era therapeutic hopes of restoring patients to sanity were largely replaced by programmes of control, where best practice was judged by inmates' docility.

As part of the passion for measuring and classifying, patient records and photographs were kept, in order to 'illustrate' the physical evidence or effects of different types of derangement. Particular attention was paid to female patients, whose lack of approved feminine qualities was tautologically taken to 'prove' their madness. Over the period, sexualised theories of insanity were steadily imposed on mad women, in ways that were unmistakably manipulative.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the term 'neurasthenia' came into use to describe milder or temporary nervous conditions, especially among the educated classes. Throughout the era, since disorders of both body and mind were believed to be heritable conditions, the chronic sick, the mentally impaired and the deranged were vigorously urged against marriage and parenthood. She has written widely on gender and society in the 19th century.

She is currently a visiting professor at the Humanities Research Centre of the University of Sussex and is working on Victorian representations of ethnicity. We have launched a new website and are reviewing this page. Find out more. Victoria and Albert Museum The world's leading museum of art and design.


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