As an activist and reformer, Dickens facilitated the development of shelters for homeless women (the Urania Cottage was established in 1846), and the development of orthopedics. Dickens highlights the poor quality of nurses in his book Martin Chuzzlewit (nursing began to change during the Crimean War thanks to Florence Nightingale). He played a major role in the preservation of the first pediatric hospital in the British Empire (Hospital for Sick Children), which opened in 1852 on Great Ormond Street. He made dramatic readings, sometimes to raise funds for charity. 7 Dickens extolled the benefits of mesmerism (hypnosis), which he used to treat his wife´s headaches and regularly practiced in public (he himself refused to be put into a trance). Dicken wrote on insanity in works such as Household Words, Sketches by Boz, and The Pickwick Papers, showing that drunkenness was a disease in the first half of the nineteenth century. He noted that madness is “the most dreadful visitation to which our nature is exposed.” He also visited public institutions that treated the blind, the deaf, and the mute. He left his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished.ĭuring his visit to North America in 1842, Dickens visited two institutions in South Boston and in New York. The stroke may have been caused partially by opium use as a painkiller. 6 On June 8, 1870, at dinner, Dickens stood up and collapsed was diagnosed with apoplexy, and he died on the next day. His family doctor, Frank Beard sent him for consultation to Sir Thomas Watson, who advised him to reduce his workload. In 1868 Dickens also suffered mild dyslexia.
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I sleep well and eat well, but I write half a dozen notes, and turn faint and sick… I am getting right, though still low in pulse and very nervous.” After this traumatic experience, Dickens writes about being unable to travel by rail because he kept getting the feeling that the train carriage was tipping to over on one side, which was “inexpressibly distressing.” Post traumatic stress disorder was first mentioned by Herodotus, Shakespeare and then Dickens it entered our vocabulary only around 1980. Dickens wrote, “I begin to feel it more in my head.
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Eventually his depression brought his creativity to a near halt, and his previously prolific production almost ceased. Dickens burst into action, ministering to injured and dying passengers with brandy and water. On June 9, 1865, Dickens and his mistress, actress Ellen Nelly Fernan, survived a train accident that killed ten people and wounded dozens more. 4 His depression worsened with age, and he eventually separated from his wife, Catherine Hogarth, mother of his ten children. In his early thirties Dickens would become depressed at the start of each new novel, the first being The Chimes, in 1844. He said “walk and be happy, walk and be healthy.” 2 At the time of his death, the obvious remedy for insomnia was either alcohol (gin for the poor and whiskey or brandy for the wealthy) or the easily accessible opium in one form or another, the most popular being laudanum, a tincture of alcohol and morphine. He is known to have taken long walks at night. Dickens suffered from insomnia avant la lettre. In 1859 he developed what appears to have been gonorrhea, very likely treated with silver nitrate. In 1841 he suffered from an anal fistula and was operated without anesthetic. Several of his characters experience “fits” resembling seizures (“the falling sickness” as it was then known). He is thought to have suffered from epilepsy as a child and possibly throughout life.
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Regarding his medical conditions, Dickens had what today could be considered an obsessive compulsive disorder. Dickens’s interests included crime, education, medicine, and the class system. Dickens suffered from several medical conditions, also wrote about different diseases and contributed to English society not only in the literary aspect but also in the human manner. As for the medical aspects of his life, he was quite avant-garde. 1 The most popular and quintessential Victorian writer was Charles Dickens (1812-1870), who had written Oliver Twist (1838) and A Christmas Carol (1843). John Leech illustration – Scrooge confronts Ignorance and Want in A Christmas Carol, via Wikimedia CommonsĪt the time of the London Great Exhibition of 1851, the United Kingdom was the wealthiest and most industrialized country in the world. The medical journey of Charles Dickens March 4, 2017