This weeks story schedule has been set back a bit as most of them are incomplete or still in note form. It is evidentially quite hard work and being under the weather is a real barrier.
However, quickly now for all conscious thought is slipping away, whilst doing the hypochondriac thing of searching for remedies online, this was discovered.
Birching is a remedy for depression. Although not widely used since the 19th century, when it was often employed on hysterical women. It used to be thought that the pain was just a distraction and a quack remedy, but recent research in Russia suggests that it may work in the same way as electric shock therapy.
This rang a bell and a quick look in the Black files uncovered this from the 19th century memoirs of Elisabeth Gordon, whoever she might have been.
It was a most dreadful time and much of it I do not care to remember and certainly do not care to set down here. After my husband died, I had no care what became of either little Alice or myself. So much so that my sister took Alice to live with her for a time and I was dispatched to a doctor near Basingstoke.
I was diagnosed with extreme hysteria and confined to a room for 23 hours a day only allowed out once during that time to walk the garden. I think it had been hoped that with lots of rest and deprived of stimulation, I would begin to respond during my daily promenades.
After some weeks of this, I know not how long to be sure, the doctor and my charge nurse decided on another tack. They began talking to me sternly and forcing me into daily baths often with both the doctor and the maid present. Then there were the enemas, of which I will say nothing.
I chaffed a little at such humiliation and seeing a response, a new horror was introduced. Any protests and I was secured to my bed with my hips raised with pillows and soundly birched like a schoolgirl by the nurse and on occasion by the doctor himself. If I did not submit, then the maid was also present.
I cannot speak of the pain and the shame of it, but I can say that when I was able to look at the violent rash invested on my lower person it was the first such interest I had taken in myself for months. Seeing this I was treated to a daily course of the birch, whether I had protested or not. So much so that I often bled a little and the nurse cautioned the doctor to allow me days off to recover. It was then that I missed such applications, perhaps on account of there being nothing else in my life.
After some weeks, on days I was not birched I began to take an interest in the garden and after a time I even asked about Alice. The birching became less frequent after that and I was soon reunited with my daughter.
It is strange say, but even now, I sometimes miss that room, I think it was where I was reborn.
No idea where this was from, it must have been on file for years, anyone any wiser?
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