Strange but True
November 6 question – What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever googled in researching a story?
The awesome co-hosts for the November 6 posting of the IWSG are Sadira Stone,Patricia Josephine,Lisa Buie-Collard,Erika Beebe, and C. Lee McKenzie!
Cholera in London 1831.
I some how came across a reference to a Dr. W. B. O’Shaughnessy who treated cholera patients in 1831 by saline injections. I had a story, Laurel, set in that time period in which the female protagonist masquerading as male comes down with cholera during the London epidemic and her friends (medical students) try O’Shaughnessy’s treatment in an attempt to save her life and therefore also discover she is female.
I had one reviewer who found the masquerade premise a bit of a stretch. In the process of looking up the time period, I also found several articles about women posing as men only to be discovered after they were dead. I, as a woman living in even these more ‘enlightened’ times, don’t wonder why women might pose as men. The reviewer was apparently willing to accept the injection of a questionable solution as acceptable, but a female pretending to be male, nope.
Any rate, sometimes we fall down rabbit holes on the Internet and sometimes it is productive.
If you are interested in reading more.
Who knows where a rabbit hole may lead.
A couple of more notes/comments. It was during a later cholera epidemic in London that John Snow began a ‘statistical’ study of where cholera was occurring that led to the understand of how cholera was transmitted…in the water contaminated by ‘latrines’ built too close to wells used for drinking water or water taken from the Thames, where it flowed through London, as sewage was washed into the river at that time. Water taken from the Thames upstream did not cause cholera. How cholera was transmitted was not a question anyone in the story pursues as it would not have had an answer at the time. I worked in Laurel drinking some ‘very watered-down ale’ at a cheap dive, and leave it at that.
Fun makes a comment on diseased water supply. 18 August 1866
Well I guess this was hardly a cheerful post.
