Two-Way Mirror, Fiona Sampson [children's ebooks online .txt] 📗

work of medicine. Reading these letters two centuries later, it’s striking how much dialogue there is between the patient, the doctors, and their client her father. At the end of May, when Ba is still at home, Dr Nuttall – well-known as a lecturer, author of medical books and Physician to the Westminster General Dispensary – holds to his opinion that she’s suffering from indigestion. He writes from London with a series of intimate questions about flatulence and bowel movements: ‘You have too much good sense, my dear Elizabeth, not to be candid with me, on a point, of so much moment to yourself […] In matters of this kind, false delicacy might, & have, often, led to the most ruinous consequences.’ Patient confidentiality, or the march of time, mean that, perhaps happily, we have no record of Ba’s reply as to whether she’s been passing, in the doctor’s colourful words, ‘clay-coloured, or greenish, or blackish, or frothy, or mucous, or yeasty motions’, or suffered ‘much distension from wind, & does it escape?’

Instead, we watch as Nuttall, Cother and others gradually eliminate the most likely causes of her symptoms. ‘Your active turn of mind, & inactive state of body, together with your age &c incline you, as well as other young bodies under similar circumstances, to dyspeptic complaints’, Nuttall suggests. But his warning seems arbitrary. The high-spirited Ba is no indoor geek, even though she’s made the transition from childish bodily freedom to the inhibitions of adolescence: gentility expects a girl her age to muffle her body elaborately and adopt a sedentary lifestyle – just as her newly arriving menstrual cycle may make her feel, especially at first, that her body is busy with its own secret affairs.

Still, Nuttall won’t be the last clinician to warn writing women about imaginary dangers posed by an ‘active turn of mind’. Does his patient object? We can’t be sure, but it’s just three weeks after this pronouncement, on 24 June, that Cother is called in to give his opinion – which is that something serious is amiss: ‘Probably referable to derangement in some highly important organ […] At the same time that I confess, the positive proofs are wanting of the existance of diseased spine, I must say that this is the best inference, I could draw.’

From her room in Gloucester, Ba protests the frightening diagnosis that ‘the spine’ could be ‘the seat’ of her illness even while insisting that she’s sicker than Mamma realises. Small wonder if she sends mixed messages as she waits nervously to see what Dr Baron will find when he comes, soon after her arrival, ‘to examine my back accurately and with particular care in order either to remove or satisfy his own doubts’. Unfortunately for her the upshot is that he agrees with Cother, and recommends confinement in a spinal sling. Ba is to spend the coming months ‘a young lady on her back’.

It’s bad news. But all the same, ‘I do not wish to return home my dearest Mamma till I am well and perhaps the wish may be natural considering that illness casts a shade of apathetic gloom.’ And it could be worse. She won’t actually be subject to fierce mechanical traction; her spine will be held motionless in position, perhaps lightly stretched by gravity. Ba and her doctors have left no description of this sling, but those in use at this time are harnesses, often with front and back plates for the torso and a collar that fits under the chin. Since the seventeenth century, doctors have also been using Francis Glisson’s hanging sling, which suspends the vertebral column from a collar round the patient’s neck; Ba is lying down, and hers may be attached to the bedhead. The apparatus, with its pulleys and cord, looks a bit like the home-made machines of Heath Robinson, or Wallace and Gromit. For the patient herself, though not particularly painful, it is restricting. Ba can’t move her head, which makes reading difficult and writing impossible.

By the time 1821 turns into 1822, her bravado has worn off. She writes to Aunt Bummy with understandable self-pity:

I have often entertained hopes that you and dear Grandmama might be inclined to enliven my confinement but alas! how often have I been disappointed! I fear many months must yet pass ere I change my position and tho’ I endeavour to be as patient as I can yet dearest Bum the prospect is melancholy. Oh! how I do wish you were here but it would be too much I fear to ask!

Company is the only way out of the imprisoning, imprisoned body in the apparatus. Ba arrived in Gloucester accompanied by her favourite uncle, Sam, and she will always remember how he ‘was […] to me Uncle brother friend & nurse when I lay in the long weary sickness at Gloucester. I can never forget that —& the gratitude and the love were as one.’ Papa’s unmarried brother is standing in for the man himself, who will visit just once, around New Year. By autumn 1821, the patient has ‘my learned companion Master Bro by the side of my classical couch hurling a look of contempt at Doctor Baron and of defiance at little Tommy Cooke.’ Aged just fourteen, Bro as eldest son is taking his turn as Papa’s deputy. But he’s also her favourite brother, and this temporary renewal of their childhood complicity must feel like some kind of remission.

The siblings have two months together, recreating their old intimacy, before late October brings a visit from Mamma – who has brought along the family’s third son, six-year-old Stormie – heralding Bro’s return to school. Luckily, the renewed separation causes no relapse; Ba’s mother finds her ‘considerably better’. And when no family are in attendance there’s always ‘Little Tommy Cooke’, who ‘is quite divine and excels at my toilet with as much grace as ever’. This diminutive says a lot: for all Dr Baron’s social climbing, in 1821 gentry regard doctors as little