Any victorian era experts? Need help.

[TheMarkz0ne 962]

I will not get into great detail as to why. But I am fascinated currently with the hospital conditions of that time. NOT the health quality. I know people didn't die in their 30s and 40s like the medical industry lies about. I looked up stats going back hundreds of years and people have stayed consistent for the past couple of hundred and even thousand years depending on your region. If we're talking bout plagues that ravaged Europe and the undrinkable water supply, that's a different story. But I digress.

 

I want to know how hospitals handled mortality rates. Pretty much injured and on the verge of death patients. From what I read hospitals during this time was like pre ordering your casket. Also how were burials conducted? Were some deaths swept under the rug? I mean after all, the 1800s in Britain were not great societal times. Yeah the industry might have been booming, but it was a deranged time.

[FoxOsprey 46]

I'm not an expert but I know that a lot of medical emergencies were handled at the house; transport wasn't particularly good at that point so hospitals weren't of much use then.

[Redacted 71]

I can elaborate on that,

 

The medical conditions were pretty awful for the time, a good comparison would be hospitals during the civil war. Limbs that had bullets in them that were too deep in the skin would often have to be amputated. And the survival rate for this was extremely low. After the civil war was when antibiotics and new medical sciences were beginning to be introduced. For the most part, Napoleonic Wars through the Civil War and perhaps a bit of the Franco-Prussian war, medicine was very primitive compared to today. Regarding transportation of the dead, they were mostly put in mass graves, in battles like Antietam where there weren't enough medical professionals and too many dead and wounded to transport were often left for decomposition. It wouldn't be until 20 years later when the US government put the remains of the dead from that battle in their proper resting place. Hospitals were often overflowing with patients and "The screaming from the dismembered soldiers could be heard for a mile away." Wrote a private of the 71st New York at the battle of Antietam. As I stated before, mass graves were extremely common during this time and were a quick and easy way to dispose of the dead, especially during wars.

 

Thanks for reading

[Fhaolan 4,483]

Depends on when in the Victorian era you're talking about, and exactly where. There was a pretty massive shift in hospitals during that time, much like there was a pretty big shift in all Western culture. In the beginning, hospitals and hospices were interchangeable. It was a place you ended up in if you had a incurable illness and you were waiting to die, while having experimental procedures done as the physicians tried to figure out what was going on. Going into a hospital at that point meant you would likely get *more* sick, as the understanding of how diseases spread wasn't quite there yet.

 

Many hospitals were converted great houses, complete with secret passages that were originally escape tunnels for the nobility. Often these were used to ferry the corpses out to mass graves. Not because of secrecy, but because the tunnels were more convenient than going out the regular doors. Purpose-built hospitals had very small rooms with no airflow, as that was the only thing physicians were sure about. They thought all diseases were air-born, so to keep the diseases contained, they basically put patients in as air-tight of containers as they could.

 

As the era progressed, hospitals specialized. Some became asylums, some became geared towards a specific illness, some took only the rich, and some only the poor. Antiseptics were discovered, and the idea that diseases could be transmitted several different ways took hold. By the end of the Victorian era, hospitals were actually successfully 'curing' people.

[Treble Bolt 1,122]

Europe may not be what you are looking for if you want more than what your history class in high school talked about. Looking into other nations and even modern indigenous tribes can give you an idea of how medical care differed in the world. During the time Europe had high mortality, China and other nations were thriving, healthy and lived long lives....just a thought...

And when it came to death and how people approached it, religious beliefs dictated that, even for the doctors.