Museum & Herb Garret
Herbals & Pharmaceuticals: Colic
Posted: June 12, 2024
Disclaimer The research and writing done for this project were not completed by a medical practitioner, and thus any recommendations made must be taken with caution. Please understand that this…
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Featured Object: Domestic Medicine Chest
Posted: October 31, 2022
What role did women play in medicine in the 19th-century home? What was kept in a domestic medicine chest? Want to learn more? Read the full blog. See our Featured Objects…
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Featured Object: Rhubarb
Posted: October 31, 2022
What caused the 18th-century ‘rhubarb mania’? What was rhubarb used to treat? How did rhubarb end up as an ingredient in British puddings? Want to learn more? Read the full…
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Featured Object: Dr Macaura’s Blood Circulator
Posted: October 31, 2022
How did a hand-cranked vibrotherapy device become a Victorian health craze? Could it really cure everything from infantile paralysis, deafness, cancer and TB to rheumatism, constipation, anxiety, “women’s issues” and…
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Featured Object: Whirling Spray Ladies’ Syringe
Posted: October 31, 2022
What does one do with a Whirling Spray? Why might a vaginal douche have been under the floorboards of a terraced house in Clapham? Want to learn more? Read the…
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Featured Object: The Champetier de Ribes Bag
Posted: October 31, 2022
How was labour induced in the 19th century? How did an inflatable bag save thousands of women’s lives? Want to learn more? Read the full blog. See our Featured Objects playlist on YouTube…
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Featured Object: Cranioclast
Posted: October 30, 2022
Warning: This video includes details of surgical procedures, childbirth, difficult deliveries, stillbirth, and death. Cranioclasts reduced the risk of deadly infection, so why was their use controversial? Want to find…
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Women, Medicine Chests, and Family Health in the 19th-century Home
Posted: August 12, 2022
Women’s participation in administering medical care has frequently been overlooked. Histories of medicine have often focussed on the activities of doctors and surgeons, or on innovations made in laboratories and…
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‘Lister’s Towels’: Menstrual Madness
Posted: February 24, 2022
In an unfamiliar supermarket, zipping unceremoniously from aisle to aisle, trying to find women’s un-signposted treasure: the feminine hygiene aisle. If this sounds familiar, you probably have a vagina. Despite…
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Cranioclast: An Instrument of Hope and Fear
Posted: December 9, 2021
Content Warning Please be advised that the following article contains a graphic discussion of surgical procedures, childbirth, difficult deliveries, stillbirth, and death. Midwifery is one of the oldest medical practices.…
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Doctor Gerald Macaura’s Blood Circulator
Posted: December 9, 2021
Are you suffering from headaches? Stiff joints? Paralysis? Deafness? These days such an extensive list of ailments would require a complex variety of treatments, ranging from pills to physical therapy…
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Women’s Health: Fashion and the ‘Weaker Sex’
Posted: December 9, 2021
Our own ‘Mrs Grieve’, a most valued member of the museum team. Often remarked upon, the most noted thing is not how she died or even the use of her…
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Childbirth in the Victorian Era in Three Chapters
Posted: October 3, 2021
*Disclaimer* Please be advised this body of research contains discussion of miscarriage and infant death that can be triggering for some. The season is upon us, so let me tell…
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The Champetier de Ribes Bag
Posted: October 3, 2021
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the Champetier de Ribes bag is an old-fashioned water bottle because in many ways that’s exactly what it is. Invented in 1887 by Dr…
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‘Gold, Silver and Rhubarb’, Britain’s mystery wonder drug that became its favourite pudding
Posted: October 3, 2021
Strange as it seems, until relatively recently rhubarb was an exotic mystery plant from unknown lands. Nowadays it may be more at home in a pie or a crumble than…
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The Whirling Spray – A Secret Contraceptive Device
Posted: October 3, 2021
Is it a pump? A turkey baster? An old car horn? No, it’s the ‘Whirling Spray Ladies’ Syringe’ – a vaginal douche! This orange rubber syringe dating to the 1890s,…
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The Fear of Female Physicians (Cunning-Women) in Anglo-Saxon England
Posted: August 1, 2019
‘Woman is the gate of the devil, the path of wickedness, the sting of the serpent, in a word, a perilous object.’ Saint Jerome, 4th century. In the small Cotswold village…
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Seeing is Believing: Spiritualism in the Victorian Era-Part 4
Posted: August 1, 2019
The Society of Psychical Research was one of a number of organisations established in Britain in the latter part of the 19th century. It was founded in 1882 by a…
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Seeing is Believing: Spiritualism in the Victorian Era-Part 3
Posted: August 1, 2019
In the dawn of modern spiritualism the general means of communication employed by the spirits were “raps” or “alphabet rapping”, where a medium could relay messages from the deceased by…
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Seeing is Believing: Spiritualism in the Victorian Era-Part 2
Posted: August 1, 2019
In mid-Victorian London the early spiritualist movement was relatively small and mainly dominated by the upper circles of society. A varied grouping of middle-class intellectuals and professionals became the early…
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Seeing is Believing: Spiritualism in the Victorian Era-Part 1
Posted: August 1, 2019
“There exists… a Higher science, which is also religion in the truest sense, which deals with hidden forces in nature at which Physical science stops short, but which are more…
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William Lowder: A Male Midwife in 18th-Century England
Posted: August 1, 2019
Midwifery was a developing science in the 18th century. New discoveries were being made in anatomy and physiology; new instruments were developed, and midwifery schools began to open, with courses…
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