Shocking Bodies by Iwan Rhys Morus

Author:Iwan Rhys Morus
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752463810
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

CONSTANCE PHIPPS

TEN

LADY CONSTANCE’S PAIN

Constance Phipps was ill and confined to her bed. She was suffering from headaches and probably complained of sensations of numbness in her arms and legs. The correspondence between her father and one of her medical practitioners, discussing the details of her treatment, does not specify exactly what was wrong with her, but from it we can learn several other things. The letters are undated but other evidence indicates that they were almost certainly written sometime between 1863 and 1871. Constance at this time would have been a young woman, somewhere between the ages of 11 and 19 – what we would call a teenager, though the Victorians had no such term in their vocabulary. It is further clear from the correspondence that a portion of Constance’s treatment was being administered by her father, overseen by at least two other medical practitioners. One of these practitioners was Harry Lobb, who by the beginning of the 1860s was starting to forge a formidable reputation as an advocate of medical electricity. He specialised in the electrical treatment of neuralgia and nervous complaints more generally. Constance Phipps was at just the right age and was a member of the appropriate social class and gender to be regarded as particularly at risk of precisely these kinds of ailments.

The position in which Constance found herself was therefore not particularly unusual. By the middle of the nineteenth century, electricity was broadly accepted as an effective form of medical treatment for a wide range of nervous disorders by many medical practitioners, although its use as a therapy was also considered to be tantamount to outright quackery by many others. Self-proclaimed specialists in nervous diseases, such as Harry Lobb or Thomas Laycock, argued that young adolescent women like Constance were particularly prone to these kinds of conditions as a result of their sex and upbringing; they were at the mercy of their reproductive organs. Young women of the middle and upper classes, cosseted and spoilt by overindulgent parents and subjected to the whims of fashionable society, were almost inevitably given to hysteria – or so argued those men whose interests lay in promising ways of restoring equilibrium. Electrical treatments were offered to anxious paterfamilias as a way of bringing wayward family members back under paternal control.1 It is not clear how common it was for the anxious fathers to carry out the electrical treatment with his own hands, as seems to have happened in Constance’s case, but advocates of electrotherapy quite often emphasised that this was a regimen that could be administered safely by a family member or servant under the appropriate medical direction. In many respects then, it seems reasonable to say that the cast of characters in this particular little drama were, if not typical, then at least not greatly out of the ordinary.

Paradoxically, the member of this cast about whom least is known is the leading lady. Very little can be gleaned about the short life of Lady Constance Mary Phipps.

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