A Duke by Any Other Name by Grace Burrowes Page 0,126
the treatments he had found most effective over decades of dealing with the mentally infirm.
Those were, in order: bloodletting, laxatives (usually mercury-based), emetics, a starvation diet (“food and drink that contain but little nourishment…combined with the three remedies above…”). This regimen (assuming the patient survived it, which many did not) was to be followed by stimulating aliment, drink, and medicine (meaning spirits); warm baths; cold baths; friction to the trunk of the body; the excitement of pain (yeah, he went there); salivation; blisters; exercise; and “terror,” among other approaches.
Rush also developed a chair that prohibited the patient any movement, even turning the head, and he was also comfortable with using a spinning chair, which twirled the patient into prolonged vertigo and nausea.
And this guy was considered a humane, enlightened, educated, well-intended, highly knowledgeable authority on treatment of the insane.
So, the chances of Robert ending up in a private madhouse were pretty good. That he was from a ducal family with a martinet of a father might have mitigated against the more severe treatments inflicted on the powerless elsewhere, but also would have assured that any physician or judge making an annual inspection of Dr. Soames’s establishment would have been reluctant to question Robert’s confinement.
On a cheerier note, it’s worth mentioning that York, United Kingdom, became the site of significant mental health care reform under the aegis of the Society of Friends. The York Asylum was one of the licensed madhouses established pursuant to applicable law. A Quaker widow, Hannah Mills, was admitted to this institution in 1790 and died shortly thereafter. She’d been denied any contact with friends or family while at the institution and had been in good physical health when admitted. The Quaker community became suspicious regarding the circumstances of her death, but could do nothing at the time.
When Quaker philanthropist William Tuke visited a London mental hospital following Hannah’s death, he found the conditions there predictably deplorable, and he became determined to create a better option. In 1796, with the aid of charitable supporters, he opened the York Retreat. The building featured spacious, airy corridors where patients could wander at will even if they could not go outside. Other reforms included what we would call occupational therapy (arts and crafts, gardening, board games), line-of-sight supervision, minimal use of restraints and the straitjacket vastly preferred to chains, and an abandonment of the “heroic medicine” favored by Dr. Rush.
The residents were encouraged to read books and to write, and to interact with the domestic animals kept in the Retreat’s various yards and gardens.
In 1813, Tuke wrote a treatise on the methods used at the Retreat, and initial reactions included much derision and criticism. His approach, though, was simultaneously being developed and adopted by forward-thinkers in France, Italy, and elsewhere, and came to be influential throughout the English-speaking world.
So, yes, Robert could have easily been packed off to a house of horrors masquerading as a mental hospital. He would have kept company there with people whom we wouldn’t regard as insane, while putting up with “medical” interventions that would have killed a lesser man.
Fortunately, he also ran into a very young Constance Wentworth, but that is a tale for another time.…
Look for Robert and Constance’s story in THE TRUTH ABOUT DUKES
Available Fall 2020
Keep reading for a preview.
Chapter One
Constance Wentworth sidled along the edge of the ballroom, trying to look like a forgettably plain woman making a discreet exit. This should have been a simple challenge, because she was forgettably plain and she desperately needed to make a discreet exit.
When she was two yards shy of the archway, Robert, Duke of Rothhaven, turned his gaze in her direction.
Bollocks and bedamned, he recognized her. Surprise flashed in his green eyes, as fleeting as distant lightning on a summer night, and then he lifted his glass of punch in a gesture of acknowledgment.
More than ten years later, and still he knew her at sight, as she’d known him. His height was striking, but so was his sense of focusing utterly on the object of his attention. Rothhaven came to a still point, then aimed every sense exclusively and intensely at who or what had caught his notice.
He was worth noticing too. Deep-set emerald eyes, dramatic brows that gave him a slight air of inquisitiveness at all times. High forehead, dark hair pulled back in an old-fashioned queue. Features that blended Nordic power and Celtic ruggedness with just enough Gallic refinement that his portraits would be stunning, even into old age.