Cancer

The bogus lady doctor

In a recent post for the British Newspaper Archive, I mentioned Maria Owen, who posed as a doctor in late Victorian Birmingham. Here’s some more information about her, adapted from my book, The Quack Doctor: ‘I can cure you,’ the representative of the Ladies’ Medical Association told 37-year-old Julia Ann Ralph. ‘If you will trust […]

‘Like a half-felled cow’ – a case of arsenic poisoning in Victorian Scotland

When you’re under the weather and you Google your symptoms in an attempt to convince yourself that you are about to die, spare a thought for Jean Landess, whose perusal of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia was the beginning of a tragic chain of events. In May 1868, 39-year-old Mrs Landess, of Paisley, had just weaned her youngest […]