Victorian

Dangerous beauty: Madame Anna Ruppert

Anna Ruppert’s career as a beauty specialist brought her acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, but there was a deadly secret to her success.

Notorious Chrimes: The Blackmail Pills

In 1890s London, the ‘Lady Montrose Pills’ blackmail scheme efficiently and heartlessly targeted more than 8,000 victims. In this comprehensive account of the case, Dick Weindling introduces the Chrimes brothers, who manufactured this audacious scam.

Victorian asthma cigarettes: who was Dr Batty?

Some 19thC doctors saw smoking as an efficient way to deliver medication to the lungs – but the popular ‘Dr Batty’ advertisement isn’t real.

To raise false hopes: Antidipso

‘Tears and prayers are of no use,’ warned the eyecatching pictorial advertisement in the Penny Illustrated Paper. It was perhaps the most truthful statement Arthur Lewis Pointing, proprietor of the anti-drunkenness powder, Antidipso, had ever come up with.

Du Brange mentioned in The Times, Sat 30 Oct 1869 (www.newspapers.com)

The mysterious Doctor Du Brange

In this guest post from Dick Weindling and Marianne Colloms, an 1870s Kilburn practitioner finds himself in court for distributing indecent handbills.

Dr Wheeler and the Bacillus of Death

British newspapers reported in 1895 that someone had discovered the ‘Death Microbe’.

Maria Owen, the bogus lady doctor

In the West Midlands in the 1890s, Maria Owen pretended to be a doctor in order to part people from their cash.

Advertisement for the Rev E J Silverton, 1884

Detective Caminada and the quack doctors

Dr Angela Buckley, author of The Real Sherlock Holmes, relates Detective Jerome Caminada’s encounter with an ecclesiastical con artist in 1870s Manchester.

The New and Delightful Method - Punch vol 45 p175

‘A new sensation’: hair-brushing by machinery

Originating in Bristol in 1862, the hair-brushing machine whirred its way into the public consciousness of Victorian Britain.

Mademoiselle Cavania: England’s ‘only female doctor’?

Roger Cavania Sanders tells us more about his ancestor Mademoiselle Esther Cavania, who sold ‘Cavania’s Wonder-Worker Lotion’ in 1870s England.