Hidden killers of the Victorian home

Tonight’s BBC4 documentary, Hidden Killers of the Victorian Home (10pm) reveals just how many ‘innovative’ domestic products and gadgets harboured deadly poisons and diseases.

Researchers from Modern TV spent several days  in Special Collections and Archives consulting illustrated Victorian periodicals, gathering stills for the documentary. Many useful images, often adverts, were found in Punch, the Illustrated London News, The Graphic, and magazines aimed at the Victorian housewife, such as The Sketch, The Queen, and Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. Over 1000 images were gathered in the research process.

The documentary explores the presence of arsenic in Victorian wallpaper, lead in toys’ paint, the unsafe use of gas and electricity, and unsterilised babies’ feeding bottles. It also explores the detrimental effect that the introduction of metal eyelets had on corsetry. The eyelets allowed women’s corsets to be pulled even tighter in the indulgence of fashion, causing considerable damage to the back and internal organs, and increased the risk of miscarriage, as many women continued to wear restrictive corsets throughout pregnancy.

Hidden Killers of the Victorian Home is available on iPlayer until 11th April 2013.

Resource guide for women’s history launched for International Women’s Day

Special Collections and Archives is marking International Women’s Day 2013 with the launch of its latest resource guide on women’s history and gender studies. The guide covers sources from the 16th-21st centuries, including:

• Bibliographies and reference works on British women’s history and writing;
• Biographies of the lives of women;
• Gendered children’s literature and comics;
• Conduct, etiquette and advice manuals;
• Broadsides and ballads relating to women as both victims and perpetrators of crime;
• Memoirs, diaries and autobiographies of women;
• Sources relating to women teachers, and girl’s eduction;
• Journals, magazines and ballads on fashion and dress;
• Historical works on women’s health and medical treatment, including the history of midwifery, gynaecology and obstetrics; the history of nursing as a profession; and reports of the Medical Officer for Cardiff, including data on maternity and child welfare;
• A range of material relating to women’s lives around the world, including newspapers from Indian women’s organisations, Spanish Civil War sources related to women, sources relating to women in Australia, European Union and United Nations reports on women, and papers of female slavery abolitionists;
• A wide range of women’s journals and magazines, from society pages to radical suffragette publications;
• Literary works by women, including the papers of Ann Griffiths (poet), Joan Reeder (journalist), Maria Edgeworth (novelist), Felicia Hemans (poet), Mary Tighe (poet), and Lady Sidney Morgan (novelist). Information on female applicants to the Royal Literary Fund, and women writers published by Longmans;
• Musical scores and archives from Morfydd Llwyn Owen (1891-1918), Grace Williams (1906-1977), and Nancy Storace (1765-1817);
• Press cuttings from late 20th century Welsh newspapers on women’s issues;
• Political papers from the British Labour Party and Newport Labour Party on women’s issues; papers of the Labour MPs Ellen Wilkinson and Marion Phillips; the diary of social reformer Beatrice Webb; archives of the Women’s Labour League, journals by Sylvia Pankhurst, and a range of suffragette magazines;
• Books by and archives belonging to female travellers;
• Papers relating to the history of female students at Cardiff University and its predecessors;
• Sources on witchcraft and those accused of its practice (commonly women), in Europe and America;
• Sources on women’s societies

Lunchtime workshops: women’s history and gender studies

Special Collections and Archives’ series of lunchtime workshops continues in December with sessions on women’s history and gender studies sources. The workshops are intended to raise awareness of the breadth of material available to support research in this area, and as a general introduction to using Special Collections and Archives.

The second workshop on women’s history sources will be led by Assistant Archivist, Alison Harvey. Topics will include: biography; children’s literature; conduct/advice manuals; crime; diaries and autobiographies; education; fashion; health and medicine; international affairs; journals and magazines; literature and journalism; music; newspapers; politics, suffrage and the labour movement; travel; University history; witchcraft; and women’s societies.

Workshops will be held in Special Collections and Archives, on the lower ground floor of the Arts and Social Studies Library, Corbett Road, Cardiff. The women’s history workshop is scheduled for 12-1pm on Thursday 6 December, and will be repeated at 1-2pm on Friday 7 December.

Workshops are open to all, but places are limited, so if you would like to attend either session, please email HarveyAE@cf.ac.uk, stating your preferred time.

A well-used book: marginalia and manuscript notes in an early 16th century herbal

This early herbal forms part of our Continental collection and was published in Paris around  1520. Our copy of Herbarum varias qui vis cognoscere vires (‘Various types of herbs that you want to know the powers of’) has been extremely useful to its previous owners and virtually every page is covered with detailed manuscript notes, observations, lists of ingredients, recipes and other marginalia.

Herbals, from the medieval Latin liber herbalis (‘book of herbs’), contain the names and descriptions of plants with details of their medicinal or culinary properties, often with illustrations to assist with proper identification. These books were among the first literature to be produced in both the East and the West and continued to flourish long after the invention of moveable type in the mid 15th century. We have several other early printed herbals in the Cardiff Rare Books Collection but none have been quite as well used as this one!

The right way to a long life: a 17th century physician on health, obesity and smoking

While cataloguing part of our Early English collection, I discovered this interesting work by the 17th century Somerset physician, Tobias Venner (1577–1660). Venner was a  pioneering writer on health and nutrition - he produced an important early treatise on the effects of tobacco and was also the first writer to use the term ‘obesity’.

On graduation from St Alban’s College, Oxford in 1599, Venner returned home to Somerset to establish his practice. By the time he obtained his medical degrees in 1613, he was already spending summers in Bath, where the city’s thermal spa enjoyed a reputation for the treatment of illness, and the annual influx of visitors ‘taking the waters’ provided a lucrative market for physicians.

In 1620 Venner published Via recta ad vitam longam (The right way to a long life), in which he described how hygiene, diet and environment can influence health. He cautioned against drinking water conveyed through lead piping and advocated cleaning of the teeth to prevent decay. Our 1622 edition of Via recta… is also bound with the second part, published the following year, in which he describes the benefits of sleep and regular exercise. Venner claimed that bathing in Bath’s thermal springs would “make slender such bodies as are too grosse.” “Let those that fear obesity …  come often to our Bathes. For by the often use of them … they may not onely preserve their health but also keepe their bodies from being unseemingly corpulent.”

Via recta… includes plenty of advice on sensible eating and drinking. For example, while Venner considered wine to be healthy in moderation, he believed it unsuitable for younger men because it “stimulates them like madmen unto enormous and outrageous actions.” Obviously not much has changed over the last 400 years!

Tobias Venner is also famed for his Briefe and accurate treatise concerning the taking of the fume of tobacco, first published in 1621. Although he recommended tobacco to improve digestion, Venner personally disliked its “detestable savour” and his observations on the adverse effects of smoking are remarkably close to those of modern medicine: “It dries the brain, dims the sight, vitiates  the smell, hurts the stomach, destroys the concoction, disturbs the humours and spirits, corrupts the breath, induces trembling of the limbs. It desiccates the windpipe, lungs and liver, annoys the milt, scorches the heart, and causes the blood to be adjusted.”

Venner could certainly claim to have discovered the right way to a long life: he died at Bath on 27 March 1660 at the grand old age of 83 and was buried in Bath Abbey.