The loss of a wife rarely altered a man’s status, but the loss of a husband changed a woman’s life forever. Becoming a widow brought risks, but there was opportunity there as well. Unlike a married woman, in the 1600s and 1700s a widow could inherit land, sign contracts and join professional bodies like trade guilds. Women often took over the trade of their deceased husbands and wielded significant economic power.
Mourning is the outward display of grief. It can make the personal, societal. It is loss shared. For much of history the formal rituals surrounding mourning were widely understood. You knew what was expected of you, depending on your class, gender and relationship with the deceased.
In the 1500s and 1600s grief was believed to manifest as physical diseases and could be treated by physicians using leeches, laxatives and vomits. According to one physician, Jeremiah Wainwright, writing in 1707, ‘Diarrhoeas from immoderate Grief, are incurable’.
The rituals that followed dying at home made death a community event up to the 1900s. Friends and family gathered to share stories and assist in the preparation of the body. The tasks performed were both practical and ritualistic. The corpse was washed and the limbs were straightened and tied together with string.
This surprising find was amongst the correspondence of John Abercrombie. Abercrombie was a popular doctor in early 19th century Edinburgh. His private means gave him the opportunity to pursue his academic interests and in 1828 he published 'Diseases of the Stomach, Intestinal Canal, the Liver and the other Viscera of the Abdomen'. It was probably because of his known interest in diseases of the stomach that an unknown friend or associate sent Abercrombie a copy of the post mortem.
Letters in our archive show that it's been at least 400 years since doctors began discussing the harmful effects of smoking, particularly on young people. One doctor in the early seventeenth century having gone so far as to write proposing that tobacco should be renamed as “Youths-bane”, given its adverse health effects.
