Articles about the practice of both science and pseudoscience during the Regency
This post originally appeared on Clare Alexander‘s blog on March 15, 2017. Reposted with permission from the author. The Explorers Club When I was six years old or so, I wanted to be a naturalist. I pictured myself studying the world of Nature to learn her secrets. Nurtured by children’s picture books with lush watercolors…
A cross-post from The Regency Redingote: Truth, as usual, is always stranger than fiction. The machines that wove all those lovely French silks which were so often smuggled into England during the war with Napoleon did indeed provide the key to issuing commands to computers shortly after the Regency. This same method continued in use…
A cross-post from The Regency Redingote: Though I have not yet read a Regency novel in which an orrery has been introduced, these complex and often exquisite objects were very popular during that decade. Many cultured gentlemen, or gentlemen with pretensions to culture, would have had an orrery on display in their library or book…
Regina Scott, whose latest print book is The Husband Campaign, shares with us some fads in medicine which held sway during the Regency. As she points out, the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same. Regina’s article makes an interesting follow-up to Angelyn Schmid’s article on Sir Henry Halford, a fashionable…
A cross-post from The Regency Redingote: Stones and dust hardly seem the things of romance. And yet the behaviour of these particular stones and this special "dust" is frequently used as a metaphor for the power of romantic attraction. However, that may not be immediately obvious to those of us living in the twenty-first century,…
A cross-post from The Regency Redingote: Perhaps abandoned is a more appropriate description of the fate of this live-saving practice by the medical community in the early years of the Regency. Surely I must be mistaken, as mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, that which the English call mouth-to-mouth ventilation, was not known until the mid-twentieth century? Sadly, there…
Many of us have run across references to the famed herbal by Nicholas Culpeper in the course of our research into various aspects of Regency medicine and horticulture. Though it was originally published in the mid-seventeenth century, it was still in print during the Regency. Not only was it still considered an important medical reference,…
Railways in the Regency era? Linda Banche explains how Regency Railways did exist. We think of the railroad as a Victorian invention, but railroads as we know them today got their start during the Regency.
Laughing Gas at Landsdowne House by Angelyn Schmid. Sir Humphry Davy (1778 – 1829) was a pioneer in chemistry, having discovered important earth elements and inventing the Davy lamp used by miners to detect dangerous gases.
Doctors in the Regency By Alicia Rasley
The first realization about medicine in the Regency era is that it bears almost no resemblance to modern medicine.