At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Although lead has been removed from most consumer products, it continues to build up in the atmosphere because of industrial applications. The average person of today has about 625 times more lead in his system than someone of fifty years ago.

Never before had people found more ways to be worried in a small, confined space than Victorians in their bedrooms.

For much of history a bed was, for most homeowners, the most valuable thing they owned. In William Shakespeare’s day a decent canopied bed cost £5, half the annual salary of a typical schoolmaster. Because they were such treasured items, the best bed was often kept downstairs, sometimes in the living room, where it could be better shown off to visitors or seen through an open window by passersby.

Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were required to share a bed at an inn in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1776, and passed a grumpy and largely sleepless night squabbling over whether to have the window open or not.

To obtain a divorce in Victorian England, a man had merely to show that his wife had slept with another man. A woman, however, had to prove that her spouse had compounded his infidelity by committing incest, bestiality, or some other dark and inexcusable transgression drawn from a very small list.

The painful irony is that women frequently were unwell because considerations of decorum denied them proper medical care.

Perhaps nothing separates us more completely from the past than how staggeringly ineffectual—and often petrifyingly disagreeable—medical treatments once were.