Rummaging about in my research books for inspiration and getting sucked yet again into
Medical Common Sense and Plain Home Talk by Edward B. Foote, M.D., 1871.
This book contains such delicious chapter titles as:
- The Causes of Nervous and Blood Derangements (Violating the Moral Nature, Bad Habits of Manhood and Womanhood)
- Common Sense Remedies (Therapeutic Electricity, Animal Magnetism)
- Private Words for Women (Derangement of the Monthly Flow, Nymphomania)
- and (my personal favorite) Three Phases of Monogamic Marriage Daguerrotyped
Chapters also contained gems of wisdom in support of:
- female doctors
- “practical involuntary masturbation”
- ladies being allowed to “pop the question”
- and the vital importance of married couples “sleeping apart” (by reason of the fact that if they sleep too often together they will grow to look like one another)
Very sensible stuff.
“From five to eight hours bodily contact in those magnetic elements which, when diverse in quantity and quality, produce physical attraction and passional love, promotes permanent unchange of individual electricities, and the absorption of each other’s exhalation, leading directly to temperamental inadaptation, and to the married pair growing alike physically. “
~ Edward B. Foote, M.D.
(original spelling)
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GAIL’S DAILY DOSE
Your Tisane of Smart . . .
A Victorian message in a bottle uncovered at a church in Durham. As requested by the note, renovators noted down certain information, then resealed and replaced the bottle!
Your Writerly Tinctures . . .
Why Reread A Story You Already Know?
Quote of the Day:
“Let us live, my Lesbia, let us love,
and all the words of the old, and so moral,
may they be worth less than nothing to us!
Suns may set, and suns may rise again:
but when our brief light has set,
night is one long everlasting sleep.
Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more,
another thousand, and another hundred,
and, when we’ve counted up the many thousands,
confuse them so as not to know them all,
so that no enemy may cast an evil eye,
by knowing that there were so many kisses.”
~ Catullus