Often when we think about mental illness in history our minds take us to ‘hysterical’ women in Victorian mental asylums. The connotations that come with gender and mental illness often emphasised the weakness of the female mind comparatively. It is because of this historic link that considering gender in relation to mental illness is of great importance.
Hopping Mad? The Case of Mary Tofts
By Jessie Foreman
It’s claimed to be one of the happiest days of your life. The often lengthy and excruciating pain of childbirth is supposed to be worth it, to cradle the new life in your arms. Except, this wasn’t the case for Mary Tofts (1703-1763), a woman from Godalming, Surrey, whose extraordinary birth captivated England in 1726.
On the 27th September 1726, a very pregnant Mary Tofts went into labour and gave birth in her home to a dead rabbit and a liverless cat, watched carefully by her neighbour and mother in law.[1] Over the next month, the news of Mary’s monstrous birth spread rapidly and transformed the lowly servant into something of a local celebrity. She continued to give birth throughout October to an assortment of animal body parts, including, in a single night, nine dead rabbits.[2]
Accounts of this phenomenon eventually reached the court of King George I, who sent his personal surgeon, Nathanael St. Andre, to attend the woman. On the 15th November, Mary gave birth to her fifteenth dead rabbit, witnessed by the King’s envoy. More doctors began to examine and witness Mary give birth to the rabbits, and doubts began to surface. At this time in early modern Europe, monstrous births captivated the public and could prove to be quite a profitable business.[3] St. Andre published his own report of the sensation, A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets, which only served to feed the excitement surrounding the case.
After the questioning of many other physicians and surgeons, on 7th December 1726, Mary admitted that it was a hoax, and had been inserting the corpses of cats and rabbits into her vagina, then ‘giving birth’ in front of her attendees. She was imprisoned in Bridewell after her admission, although the charges were quickly dropped.
It would be easy to brand Mary Tofts as a liar, fame-hunter, and money-grabber. It would be even easier to simply brand her as ‘mad’. These explanations are far too simplistic.
The doctors who initially witnessed Mary’s miraculous births attempted to explain her condition as ‘maternal imagination.’ This is ‘the notion that a pregnant woman could alter the development of her foetus with the power of her thoughts and feelings’.[4] In other words, the mental health of the soon-to-be-mother played a drastic role in the development of the child. In Mary’s case, St. Andre reported that she had failed to catch a rabbit while working in a field, then later ‘that same Night she dreamt she was in a Field with those two Rabbets in her Lap, and wakened with a sick Fit, which lasted till Morning,’ then had experienced an intense desire to eat rabbits, though she could not afford any.[5] This experience, contemporaries claimed, are what caused Mary’s monstrous births.
Yet, Mary admitted that the whole affair was a hoax – so what motivated her to do something like this? Having suffered a miscarriage in August 1726, just a month before the monstrous births began, it is likely that Tofts was experiencing what we would now call post-partum psychosis, which can occur in women who miscarry as well as give birth. Despite miscarrying in August, for the next four months, Mary had a very swollen abdomen and was confirmed by the many visiting physicians and surgeons to be heavily pregnant.[6] Physical effects, including phantom pregnancies, are not uncommon in women who experience post-partum psychosis.
Though extremely interesting, the case of Mary Tofts is, above all, an incredibly tragic tale of a woman who was experiencing the negative mental health effects of a miscarriage. Some have thought that a poor family like the Tofts may have simply jumped at the chance to exploit the fascination with monstrous births and make some money – perhaps in cahoots with, or at the expense of, Mary.[7]
Pregnancy in early modern Europe was a very
vulnerable and dangerous state for women to be in, both physically and mentally.
At its most extreme, it was thought that maternal impression could lead to
cases like Mary’s. Clearly, the mental health of pregnant women in early modern
England was a cause for concern.
[1] The Curious Case of Mary Toft (2009) <https://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/aug2009.html> [accessed 20/04/2019]
[2] Mary Tofts (2009) <https://www.godalmingmuseum.org.uk/index.php?page=mary-tofts> [accessed 02/04/2019]
[3] The Curious Case of Mary Toft (2009) <https://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/aug2009.html> [accessed 02/04/2019]
[4] Jennifer Buckley, ‘Maternal Impressions: The Discourse of Maternal Imagination in the Eighteenth Century’ (PhD thesis, University of Southampton, 2014)
[5] Nathanael St. Andre, A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets (London: Printer for John Clarke, 1727) pp.23-24
[6] Mary Tofts (2009) <https://www.godalmingmuseum.org.uk/index.php?page=mary-tofts> [accessed 02/04/2019]
[7] The Curious Case of Mary Toft (2009) <https://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/aug2009.html> [accessed 20/04/2019]
Bibliography
Buckley, Jennifer, ‘Maternal Impressions: The Discourse of Maternal Imagination in the Eighteenth Century’ (PhD thesis, University of Southampton, 2014)
Mary Tofts (2009) <https://www.godalmingmuseum.org.uk/index.php?page=mary-tofts> [accessed 20/04/2019]
St. Andre, Nathanael, A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets (London: Printer for John Clarke, 1727) pp.23-24
The Curious Case of Mary Toft (2009) <https://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/aug2009.html> [accessed 20/04/2019]
Green Sickness – Disease of Virgins
By Clare Mooney
Green sickness or chlorosis was believed to be a form of love melancholy in the early modern period. It typically occurred at the age of puberty and was thought to be caused by lack of menstruation which led to the inability to eat regular food, fainting, seizures and pale skin.[1] We do not have anything that is easily comparable to a modern mental disorder which in its extreme could lead to natural death or suicide as described by ancient and early modern medical guides. Green sickness was a gendered mental disorder which was closely associated with young womens’ virginity. Like many illnesses, both psychological and physical in this period, earlier physicians had differing opinions on its causes, symptoms and best remedies. There are many inconsistencies in views, with some medics crossing over the disease with a wandering womb, the suffocation of the mother, frenzy and other sexual illnesses which caused mental distress. I will try and outline some theories and opinions of this mental disorder to show its everyday impact on young women in early modern England.
A later depiction of lovesickness/greensickness which continued into the 19th Century and beyond.
Hippocrates is believed to have described some of the earliest causes of green-sickness in his publication Diseases of young girls and may have inspired its revival into early modern texts.[2] He described the roots to the illness:
‘blood gathered into their wombs for evacuation. Yet, when the mouth of the exit is not opened and more blood flows in due to not having a way to flow out, rushes from the quantity towards the heart and the diaphragm. When these parts are filled, the heart becomes numb; then lethargy seizes them after the numbness, then after the lethargy, madness seizes them.’ [3]
Hippocrates explained that the best way to cure women of this problem naturally was to marry as quickly as possible. With pregnancy being the sure way to become healed entirely[4]
Sexual intercourse appeared to have been one of the common cures in early modern English belief. We find examples of such in English Broadside Ballads which often take on the crude and satirical themes in popular culture. The knowledge of green-sickness would have to have been prevalent for society to take so much concern over it and jokes to have been made.
Green sickness is a weary thing
for any Maiden to indure.
Between my Knees it does so Ring
but the help of a Man is present Cure:
If a Maid can have it but in time
it will ease her of all Grief and Woe,
A maggot lyes so near my Loyn,
i’me so tormented.[5]
Alongside cures such as sexual intercourse, early modern medics were suggesting treatments which were absent of sex, such as changes to diet, exercise, purging and pill taking. The categories of green-sickness grew in observation throughout the early modern period with variations amongst the disease being recognised into the Nineteenth Century. However, the typical sufferer was still expected to be young and female. Sydenham and later writers such as John Archer developed their own ‘versions’ of green-sickness and personalised methods of treatment. Archer described the sickness as nothing more than a diffusion of choller or Melancholy or both through the whole body which caused the blood in the female body to become corrupted. An obstruction in the liver or spleen could also cause green-sickness. Archer does not suggest sexual intercourse to resolve the melancholy and/or obstruction but rather suggests a strict regime of his cordial diet drink, purging, night sweating followed by three weeks of white wine and his homemade pills.[6] This would remove the corruption in young maids blood flow, restoring her mental and physical health.
Sydenham’s approach to green-sickness differed to Archer, however both doctors avoid sexual intercourse for the cure.
Green sickness was a serious and common enough condition for publishing medics such as Archer and Sydenham to offer specific pills and remedies marketed at young women. The vagueness of the illness described by both physicians makes it challenging to determine what disease they were honestly treating, or whether it was a cultural myth that manifested into something real in young women. With many unclear symptoms, green-sickness would have been convenient to diagnose.
Credit: Jean-Martin Charcot demonstrating hysteria in a patient at the Salpetriere. Lithograph after P.A.A. Brouillet, 1887. Credit: Wellcome Collection
Official advice moved away from suggesting suffering young women could cure themselves through marital sex, toward a more medicated cure in the seventeenth century. However, direct intervention into young women’s sexual energy became more and more common into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as physicians sought to find a way to cure women’s newly defined hysteria. The less intrusive methods to curing virgins green sickness appear to have been short-lived.
[1] Winfried Schleiner, ‘Early Modern Green Sickness and Pre-Freudian Hysteria’ Early Science and Medicine, 14 (2009), pp. 663-665.
[2] Helen King ‘Green Sickness: Hippocrates, Galen and the Origins of the “Disease of Virgins”’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2 (1996), p.376.
[3] Rebecca Flemming and Ann Ellis Hanson ‘Hippocrates’ “Peri Partheniôn’ (Diseases of Young Girls): Text and Translation’ Early Science and Medicine, 3 (1998), p. 251.
[4] Ibid., p. 250.
[5] Maids Lamentation, / That lives in a great distress / Her Sweet-heart hath forsaken her, / Now she lives in weariness, / She’s almost spoil’d for Cure, / And makes such mighty moan / That she no longer can endure / Herself to lie alone, / But wisheth for a Man / To ease her of her Woe: / Her Maidenhead does trouble her, / That She’s not able for to go. (London, 1672-1969?) National Library of Scotland – Crawford EBBA 33381
<https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/33381/xml> [accessed 14 April 2019].
[6] John Archer Every man his own doctor (London, 1673) pp. 116-117.
Further Reading
- English Broadside Ballads <https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/search_combined/?ss=green+sickness >
- Flemming, Rebecca and Ann Ellis Hanson ‘Hippocrates’ “Peri Partheniôn’ (Diseases of Young Girls): Text and Translation’ Early Science and Medicine, 3 (1998).
- King, Helen, ‘Green Sickness: Hippocrates, Galen and the Origins of the “Disease of Virgins”’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2 (1996) .
- Schleiner, Winfried, ‘Early Modern Green Sickness and Pre-Freudian Hysteria’ Early Science and Medicine, 14 (2009).
- Dawson, Lesel. “‘A Thirsty Womb’: Lovesickness, Green Sickness, Hysteria, and Uterine Fury.” In Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford, 2008).
Murderous Mothers
By Jessie Foreman
Warning: this blog post contains graphic descriptions of infanticide.
Elizabeth Bathory, Myra Hindley, and Rose West: there is an enduring fascination with women who murder. Yet it is the women who choose to murder their own children (also known as filicide) who spark the most morbid interest for the rest of the population. This is the same today as it was in early modern Europe.
On the 18th December 1687, Sinah Jones of St. Mary Woolnoth, London, gave birth to a bastard baby boy.[1] She murdered her new-born son ‘by stopping its Breath with a Cloath put in its Mouth’ then wrapped the body up in a cloth, and put it in her trunk.[2] Being a servant, combined with the notorious lack of privacy in early modern homes, she was suspected by the attending nurse and midwife, as well as the ‘Master and his Servant’ who tried to open the trunk but was denied the key by Sinah.[3] Eventually they managed to break open the trunk, ‘where they all saw the Child Dead, wrapped up in a Cloath, with a Rang in the Mouth of it’.[4] When they managed to open the trunk, they found hat ‘the Child being something Warm, they tried all they could to recover Life in it’ but did not succeed.
During the trial at the Old Bailey, in January 1688, Jones ‘said little for herself’, but claimed that she did not know anything about the cloth in the baby’s mouth, and that ‘she had not her Senses; and was Light-headed.’ During the early modern period, English courts were ‘not concerned with the questions of motive, but only of fact,’ rendering Jones’ defence useless.[5] As a result of this, Jones was found guilty of murder and was hanged.[6]
It is estimated that around 5 per cent of all unmarried women in early modern England murdered their illegitimate children – Sinah’s actions were not particularly unheard of.[7] Homes were cramped spaces – especially in urban London – which led to communal sleeping areas shared between all ranks and genders of the house. It follows that ‘a master, his son, a male servant, apprentice, or boarder had ample opportunity to court, if not seduce or rape, a maidservant.’[8] Though the father nor circumstances of the child’s conception is mentioned in the Old Bailey transcript, Sinah was just one of many young women in England who murdered her baby to try and escape burning humiliation and shame, as well as rampant poverty.
One phrase that could illuminate Sinah’s motives further is that ‘she had not her Senses; and was Light-headed’.[9] It is likely that Sinah knew she was going to be sentenced to death, even if she managed to be found not guilty of the murder, as the deliberate concealment of a dead baby was also a capital crime too.[10] In addition to this, the defence of temporary insanity was rarely used by unmarried female suspects as they felt it would be admitting further guilt of concealing a pregnancy.[11] If Sinah is to be believed, then, it could be possible that she experienced some kind of post-partum psychosis or hysteria after the birth of her baby. Out of fear of losing her job, the inability to get another one, and the shame of having a bastard child, combined with a probable mental health disorder, Sinah killed her baby.
Only with the growth in the field of psychiatry in the early nineteenth century did the idea of post-partum psychosis become more accepted. Experts began trying to understand the more ‘dissociative aspects of new-born child murder, where some of the women accused of infanticide were mentally unable to acknowledge that they were pregnant or that they had given birth.’[12] If Sinah was of sound mind, it is unlikely that she would have murdered her baby in the view of other household members.
The case of Sinah
Jones and her son is tragic from beginning to end. Mental health was all but unacknowledged
in the early modern courts in cases of infanticide, leading to trials that did
not contain much contextual information that could clarify such shocking and
fatal events.
[1] Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org), January 1688, Sinah Jones (t16880113-1) [accessed 29/04/2019]
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Peter C. Hoffer, N.E.H Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England 1558-1803 (New York: New York University Press, 1984) p.145
[6] Old Bailey Proceedings [OBP], Sinah Jones (t16880113-1)
[7] Hoffer, Hull, Murdering Mothers, p.145
[8] Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Single Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) p.90
[9] Old Bailey Proceedings [OBP], Sinah Jones (t16880113-1)
[10] Laura Gowing, ‘Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present, 165 (1997) p.90
[11] Anne-Marie Kilday, A History of Infanticide in Britain c.1600 to the Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) p.168
[12] Ibid. p.169
Bibliography
Froide, Amy M., Never Married: Single Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Gowing, Laura, ‘Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present, 165 (1997), 87-115
Hoffer, Peter C., Hull, N.E.H., Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England 1558-1803 (New York: New York University Press, 1984)
Kilday, Anne-Marie, A History of Infanticide in Britain c.1600 to the Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org), January 1688, Sinah Jones (t16880113-1) [accessed 29/04/2019]
Maladies of the mind 