Detecting Jane: A Possible Cause of Jane Austen’s Early Death

 From Stephanie Barron at Crime Reads:

In May of 1816, Jane Austen is coming off a rough winter. Her brother Henry’s bank has failed, and her brothers Frank and Edward are on the financial hook to cover a serious amount of Henry’s losses. Edward, the most financially stable of Jane’s five brothers, is being sued for wrongful inheritance by a family in Jane’s Chawton neighborhood. And her beloved younger brother Charles, like Frank a captain in the Royal Navy, has lost his ship in a hurricane—and is being called before an Admiralty Review Board for dereliction of duty. Everyone is stressed. Jane and her brother Cassandra have been entertaining everyone at their small cottage, including Charles’s motherless children, and it’s no wonder Jane’s health is impaired.

She’s feeling, as she might have put it, seedy: her back aching, her stomach and bowels unsettled, her sleep wretched and disturbed. She dips into her savings from the profits of Emma, published the previous January, and carries her sister Cassandra off to Cheltenham Spa for two weeks of rest and relaxation.

Naturally, while there, she stumbles over a mystery and a number of bodies. Cheltenham was a newer, rasher, and less genteel watering-hole in 1816 than neighboring Bath, although the Master of Ceremonies for all the amusements (pump room, balls, and concerts) served both towns. Jane can only afford rooms in a boarding house, where she and Cassandra are at the mercy of their landlady’s food and their fellow-guests. But Cheltenham was also known as the residence of Dr. Edward Jenner—a notable man of Georgian medicine, and an acquaintance of the Austen family.

Edward Jenner discovered and popularized vaccination—and yes, friends, Jane received the smallpox vaccine.

One of the distinctive areas of Georgian medicine, I learned while researching Jane and the Year Without a Summer, was the oddly psychological characterization of “women’s ailments,” as they were called. Every sort of symptom a woman might experience, from headaches (a frequent complaint in Austen’s novels) to fatigue, to fragile nerves, to anorexia nervosa and infertility, was attributed to the debilitating influence of the uterus. The uterus, Georgian medical men—and they were all men—firmly believed, rendered women’s minds incapable of study; and indeed, if a woman exerted her mind in any capacity, she was liable to be unfit for childbearing—which was the sole purpose of women on earth. (Read more.)

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