fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3318 ]

[ SECRET POST #3318 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3318 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 026 secrets from Secret Submission Post #474.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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I think you're exaggerating how easy it is to find accurate and easy-to-understand information on 19th century medicine. I mean, I get very irritated by people who don't do their research; but I don't think that your given examples are that outrageous.

I was thinking the same thing. It's a pet peeve of mine when people talk of others not bothering to spend [absurdly short amount of time] Googling. Maybe it is that easy to find the answers when you already know them and know the proper search terms and sources but that doesn't make it that easy for people starting from nothing.

Proper search terms and sources? You can google "how did the victorians treat a fever" and get some basic resources. That's well within most peoples' capabilities. With internet access, research has never been easier.

You are much more trusting of the sources that turn up with a basic googling than I am.

That seems to be the common response whenever people object to the idea of research. I understand the dilemma, but it supposed that people aren't capable of looking at the website they found and making a judgment call. Is it some random person's blog with no cites? Or is it the actual text of a hosuehold guide from the 1880s? It's not impossible for the average person to figure out that an article from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is probably legit enough for fanfic research.

At some point, every author has to decide whether they should just make stuff up or trying doing a minimal amount of research, but I'm not really convinced that your argument ("But there might be dodgy sources out there!") convinces me not that Googling is a bad idea that ought not to be attempted.

I googled "how did the victorians treat a fever" without " and got nothing useful on page one... js.

This is what I got for the first four results:

http://i.imgur.com/csJ6Kuk.png

The first two sites were helpful, but very general. The third was a little more in depth, but didn't provide many specific treatments. Fourth result was the jackpot. This is only half the first page, of course, there were more useful and interesting results further down.

I got the same! Didn't seem helpful from the small google blobs...

So, on the forth site. This is the closest to the high temperature treatment it got. Otherwise it's a general info about the most widespread diseases and confusion around it. >_<
'Throughout most of the century, doctors can be said to have been conceptually helpless about the cause and treatment of the disease. A glance at the contents of a typical volume of the Lancet (1849) tells the melancholy story: "On the Advantage of Copious Bleeding in Inflammatory Diseases"; "Report of a Case of Cholera Treated by Transfusion"; "Treatment of Cholera by Small and Repeated Doses of Calomel"; "On the Employment of Embrocations and Injections of Strong Liquid Ammonia in the Collapse Stage of Cholera." One title begins promisingly, "On the Production of Cholera by Insufficient Drainage", but continues, "with Remarks on the Hypothesis of an Altered Electrical State of the Atmosphere." '

... I'm not sure why you thought you could evaluate the helpfulness of websites without first clicking on them, but you kind of need to do that to figure out what the site actually contains.

I don't know what site you're looking at. I'm referring to this one, which is very detailed:

http://www.victorianlondon.org/cassells/cassells-17.htm

(no subject)

solticisekf - 2016-02-04 04:44 (UTC) - Expand

(SA) I find, these days, that it only really annoys me if the writer turns whatever incorrect thing they're writing about into a running joke.
Like, there was one Harry Potter fic I read many years ago, where present-day characters were sent back to the time of the founders, and there was a running joke about one of the present day characters not knowing which was the right fork to use at the dinner table. And... they were about five, six hundred years too early for there to be ANY forks at the dinner table? Let alone multiple?
And in another one, a Japanese character is at Hogwarts for crossover reasons, and is really depressed about the lack of rice. Well, I don't know what the writer thinks British people eat, but rice has been a staple of boarding school meals in the UK for a pretty long time. Like, probably at least a century.

...wow, that turned out a lot longer than I meant. TL;DR - I, like OP, can get very het up about people not doing their dang research; but generally only if they keep coming back to wave their ignorance in my face and expecting me to laugh. Otherwise I shrug and live with it.

About the lack of rice - given the fact that this is a school that has a large staff of house-elves preparing every meal, Hogwarts might not reflect the type of food that typical UK boarding schools would serve. Also the wizarding world doesn't seem to update things very often, it's absolutely possible that Hogwarts is serving largely the same kinds of foods as it has for 600+(?) years.

tl:dr Hogwarts is a MAGIC school and might not have the same kind of food that muggle UK schools do.

Er... but food (even if you only addressed food in the UK) has changed a great deal over the course of 500 years. I assure you, people were not eating corn flakes and chocolate frogs in the 1400s. The rest of the food (barring the obvious magic influence) in that universe is recognizably modern.

Also keep in mind that the first documented recipes for rice pudding was in the early 1600s, i.e. Tudor period and well within your 600+ year time frame.

AYRT: Well, because I know it would bug me if I didn't, I just went and checked. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the main course of the feast involves:
roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, chips, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup and, for some strange reason, mint humbugs.
And then there is the dessert (referred to in text as pudding):
Blocks of ice cream in every flavour you could think of, apple pies, treacle tarts, chocolate éclairs and jam doughnuts, trifle, strawberries, jelly, rice pudding...

So, no. Hogwarts definitely has rice.

Hogwarts has rice, but I don't think an occasional rice pudding would stop you missing rice if it's normally your staple.

mte
Well, maybe the founders were so magical that they'd invented a fork before its time. :)

Oh, it's not that the fork wasn't invented, as such - it's more that most people ate with a spoon in one hand and a knife in the other, if they used cutlery at all.
[Actually, I just started reading the Wikipedia page, and it says that forks didn't become common in Great Britain until the 18th century - even later than I thought! It was introduced to Europe around the end of the 10th century, so I guess if the Founders were really well-traveled and very cosmopolitan they might use them... Hmmm.]

10th century? Huh, I though it was later. Btw, they had only two prongs.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2016-02-04 02:42 (UTC) - Expand

http://www.victorianlondon.org/cassells/cassells-17.htm
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/h/health-and-medicine-in-the-19th-century/
http://historicaltidbits.blogspot.com/2010/02/scarlet-fever.html
http://imaginationlane.net/blog/victorian-edwardian-cold-and-flu-remedies/
http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/science/addiction/addiction2.html

It took me longer to cut and paste those URLs than it did to find them via Google. But that's kind of beside the point. You don't have to be an expert on Victorian medicine to realize that they wouldn't be spouting the exact same (almost clichéd, really!) advice you hear in the 21st century.

But how long would it take you to actually read all of it, make sure the sources are trustworthy, and learn the information well enough to write it in the context of a story and maybe dialogue rather than sounding like a history book? I'm betting it's significantly longer than five minutes.

Well, for the first link, the index at the top indicates there's a section specifically for "eruptive fevers", so you can scroll (or do a text search) and skim for the subsections titled "Treatment". That single page lists common diseases, symptoms and recommended course of treatment. So for example, for small pox (sadly common), you see this:

Treatment.-The domestic treatment of a patient with small-pox consists in the administration of light pleasant drinks and simple diet, such as gruel, weak beef tea, milk and tea, barley-water, plain water, tepid sponging; in frequent changes of well-aired linen, and in keeping the patient in a well ventilated room, and in a bed without curtains and that does not unduly heat the patient. The room should be as thinly furnished and as free from curtains and carpets as possible, as the contagion of smallpox is very intense, and gathers about such things. For the relief of irritation in the eruption, olive oil may be applied, or equal parts of glycerine and rose-water, after bathing with tepid water. The medical treatment will of course devolve upon a medical man. In places where a medical man is not to be had, the above treatment is the most important. Violent purging should be abstained from. If the patient has been unvaccinated - and, indeed, in any severe case - the greatest danger sets in about the eleventh day of the disease, and the eighth of the eruption. The fever then increases and the swelling of the skin and face is greatest, and renders the patient both uncomfortable and most unseemly to behold. Delirium, twitchings, or diarrhoea are bad symptoms at this stage. If the anti-vaccinationists could see a case at this stage of the disease often, they would talk more gratefully and sensibly about vaccination. The patient now requires to be well supported by strong beef tea, and if much depressed, and the spots do not fill well, by wine.

It might take longer than five minutes to read it, but finding it took less than one minute. Inserting it into the context of the story doesn't have to be hard. Instead of this:

"Drink plenty of fluids," said Watson kindly, "I recommend juice."

You have this:

"Take gruel and plenty of barley water," said Watson kindly, "Or some weak beef tea."

I mean... the resource is so detailed you could use a great deal of that one paragraph alone.

"Researching is HARD and takes too long!"
"Here are a bunch of resources I found using Google that took less than a minute."
"But reading all of that would take too much time. Like, way more than five minutes! And writng is HARD."
"Not if you actually look at the helpful index at the top of the page that clearly marks out the relevant section. Then you could practically cut and paste the pertinent info into your fic."

*crickets*

"Um... Well maybe you can't trust the information you found so easily, so HA!"

LOLOLOLOLOLOL

There's accurate and there's "good enough for fanfic writing", IMO. You don't have to do much in depth research to come up with something better than the OP's example, which sounds too modern even to my inexpert eyes. I dislike it when people who write historical fiction don't at least try</I for some level of accuracy. I don't expect people to nail every single thing, but that particular era of Victorian London is extremely well documented.

Yeah it takes a little more than five minutes to find this kind of information, especially since technology was developing rapidly in all industries around that time period. Honestly, you'd have to look at several fields of medicine to get it right too, depending on the characters. So unless this is like, your major or something it isn't really all that intuitive and would take time just to research the right terms.

It might be tricky for other characters, but it's not at all difficult for Watson. We know what time period he was operating in, and his precise location and a few details about his background. Someone else in this thread has already googled about Victorian medicines and come up with a bunch of info, which isn't surprising because Victorian era London is something historians know quite a lot about. The topic has been researched and written about extensively, perhaps more so than many other time periods, in fact.

The importance of fluids in fevers was known then, actually (genuine historian here). I agree about the "juice" though, as fruit juice wasn't widely produced or much used outside explicitly vegetarian circles.

I did have to gently point out to a person whose ACD Holmesfic I was beta-ing that they didn't have antibiotics in the 1890s....

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