stuff 'n other stuff

I’ve been reading Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner as my evening reading – a change from outback noir crime novels – when I came across Steven’s Consumption cure.

Even though I’ve finished with Dows’ Pharmacy for the moment, I’ve acquired an interest in nineteenth century medicine along the way, something that dovetails into my interest in Victorian murders and the way that newspapers sensationalised the most graphic of them in order to sell papers.

So when I came across Steven’s Consumption cure I had to do some background reading about it. And it’s a curious tale.

Tuberculosis, or consumption was the scourge of the nineteenth century.

My grandfather’s first wife, Catherine Gracie, died of it, his mother died of it, and if you plough through the death certificates quite a few other family members died of it – and these were relatively middle class people who lived in relatively nice airy apartments, and living in Dundee had access to the Tay estuary and cleaner air despite the undoubted urban pollution from smoke and industry.

The urban poor, crammed in overcrowded tenements would have had it much, much worse than the middle classes.

Until the advent of antibiotics there was no real cure for tuberculosis. Most people died unpleasantly. If you could afford it, being able to live in the countryside and breathing clean air might let you live a little longer, but really, unless you were one of the roughly twenty percent of cases who recovered spontaneously, a diagnosis meant death sooner or later.

And of course, the figure of twenty percent is based on the middle and upper classes who could afford doctors and treatment. The poor simply suffered and died, and perhaps relied on patent medicines for some relief.

Most patent medicines didn’t do much – a pain killer like laudanum, some herbs to help clear the the chest and let you sleep, and that was about it. Some made outrageous claims as to their effectiveness, and of course there were always those that claimed to be derived from exotic cures from the mystic East.

Perhaps my favourite example of the latter was Bile Beans, claimed to be made from secret herbs used by Australian Aborigines, but in fact made principally from cascara and rhubarb in a factory in Leeds.

The situation regarding patent medicines was so bad that in the early twentieth century the British Medical Association analysed many patent medicines and published the results, invariably showing that they were cheaply made from standard ingredients. They also published an estimated cost of the ingredients showing that many were wildly overpriced for what they contained.

Instinctively, I would have put Steven’s Consumption cure among the quack medicines, selling hope when in reality there was none, but when I began to read about it in detail, I became less sure.

Colonel Stevens, and he liked to be called Colonel, claimed that as junior officer in South Africa he became ill with tuberculosis, and in desperation he went to see an indigenous healer who supplied him with a preparation made of a native pelargonium or geranium.

Given that at the time Europeans in South Africa probably didn’t know much about the therapeutic value of the native flora, it’s entirely possible that the plant used in the cure may have had some bactericidal properties. Or it could simply be that Colonel Stevens was one of the lucky twenty percent that went into remission.

In time Colonel Stevens returned to England and began to market his cure.

The BMA, who clearly to a man thought Stevens was a charlatan, analysed his patent medicine and claimed that his preparation contained Krameria, which is still used in herbal medicine today, but not Pelargonium as Stevens claimed.

However, this didn’t stop Stevens, who clearly believed in his medicine’s efficacy, from continuing to publicise his cure, so eventually the BMA took him to court, intending to prove he was just another charlatan exploiting poor and desperate people.

Stevens lost the court case. He appealed, and lost that case too. He was refused further leave to appeal, and you might think that would be that, but no, Stevens continued to prosper, serving in the Royal Flying Corps during the first world war, and to market his cure.

And this is where it gets interesting. After the first world war, a doctor in Switzerland started using the ‘English Cure’, ie Steven’s consumption cure, in treating his patients.

As a doctor practising in Geneva he was outside the control of the British Medical Association and free to prescribe what he liked, and he obviously thought that this preparation did some good. In fact, he made the interesting anecdotal observation that during the second world war, when supplies of Steven’s Consumption cure became unobtainable, some of his patients who had been in remission suddenly developed the full and fatal form of the disease.

With the arrival of streptomycin after the war, this all became moot, as tuberculosis ceased to be the scourge it once was.

Stevens clearly believed in his cure. He may have been deluded, but I think he was honest in his delusion. He may have profited from it, but I think he was sincere.

And, given the Swiss doctor’s observation, it may have been that it did some good.

The doctor in Switzerland strangely didn’t see it as cure but thought it might stimulate the immune system to better fight the disease.

No one today is interested in investigating Steven’s cure, but given the rise of drug resistant tuberculosis, perhaps it might be worthy of further investigation.

Strangely, you can still buy herbal preparations containing Steven’s pelargonium for chest and bronchial complaints from pharmacies in Germany …

Earlier today I tooted the following doodle by Charles Collinson Rawson

Charles Collinson Rawson was a migrant from England who settled in Port Mackay, now simply Mackay, in Queensland in 1867.

As well as being a grazier, a Justice of the Peace, a minor artist Rawson was diarist who frequently illustrated his journal with doodles. I first came across him during the pandemic when his 1877 sketch of vaccination day in Port Mackay was widely reposted.

He also doodled about the 1877 election and appears to have been against blackbirding, the process of inducing Kanaka labourers to come and work in the canefields as indentured labourers and virtually enslaving them

His diaries are lodged in the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, which is where most of these images come from.

All in all he seems to have been an engaging character, and unafraid to make fun of himself

J was down in Melbourne for a meeting in Heidelberg ast Thursday.

Chatting over breakfast this morning she said ‘Did I tell you that I saw a view that’s similar to Streeton’s Golden summer?’

Not terribly surprising, even if the area is now built up suburbia.

Streeton was a member of what’s the Heidelberg School of Australian impressionist painters, who were basically a group of artists who went out on camping and painting expeditions around Melbourne in the late 1880’s.

But actually they didn’t really go that far out of the city, simply because they went on the train – after all how else would one carry easels, tents, art supplies and the rest?

And, as a consequence they were limited by how far the suburban train network round Melbourne went out of the city.

This is neatly illustrated by their first camp in 1885 being on a property near  Box Hill.

Box Hill is nowhere near Heidelberg, in fact it’s on a completely different train line, but in 1885 it had a railway station, which had only opened three years previously in 1882, and was still a relatively rural location.

It was only after the Heidelberg railway station opened in 1888 on what is now the Hurstbridge line that the artists started using the area round Heidelberg for their summer camps, as it became possible to haul all their paraphernalia out to a summer camp site without resorting to hiring carts from the city.

At the time Heidelberg, even though the town had been established in the early 1840’s, was quite rural and remote and set in bushland. The station was as far as the train went until 1902 when the line was extended as far as Eltham.

I’ve been down an internet rabbit hole with this one.

I was reading Peter Hopkirk’s ‘Trespassers on the Roof of the World’, which summarises the adventures and misadventures of late nineteenth and early twentieth century travellers to Tibet, which for much of that time was closed to outsiders, when I came across a reference to ‘self- heating soup’.

The reference was in an account of Sir George Littledale’s expedition in 1895, and I was astounded that they had self heating soup in 1895.

So first of all I checked Google Books to check we didn’t have a transcription error

which was a little bit problematical as the search didn’t bring up the Littledale’s own account of the journey.

However I tracked down a searchable full text version of the Littledale’s own account of the journey and there it was

Silver’s self boiling soups, which are also described as self heating elsewhere in the text.

This is quite interesting as self heating cans were not supposed to have been invented until 1897 by the Russian engineer Yevgeny Fedorov, yet the Littledale’s had some self heating soup in 1895.

Unfortunately I could not trace any information about Silver’s self-heating soups, and how they worked.

I’m guessing that, like contemporary self heating cans you broke a seal allowing two chemicals to mix and generate an exothermic reaction, a bit like these disposable single use handwarmers you see for sale in ski shops.

The interesting thing is that they seem to have dropped out use.

I couldn’t find any record of any of the early twentieth century Antarctic explorers using them, but apparently Hiram Bingham used them during his expeditions in Peru around 1910.

Strangely, searching Trove, I did find an article in the Cobram Courier of 25 March 1915 on self heating cans, where they were described as a ‘new Yankee invention’, even though they had been around for almost twenty years.

Self heating soups had their heyday during world war two, when the allies issued their soldiers with cans of self heating soup. These cans worked slightly differently from current self heating cans with a compartment filled with a mixture of iron oxide and aluminium in the middle of the can, and a magnesium fuse.

Inert until the fuse was lit, the iron oxide mixture reacted to give an exothermic reaction to heat the soup.

I couldn’t find an example of a self heating soup can, but the Scott Polar Research Institute’s museum does contain two self heating cans of cocoa that work on the same principle

Every time I drove down to Chiltern to work on the documentation of Dow’s pharmacy, I would pass a dirt road signposted to Yeddonba with a stylised hand on the road sign, and I always wondered what it led to.

In fact Yeddonba is an aboriginal cultural site with some fairly stunning rock art.

The site is well signposted and about two and a half kilometres down a dirt road. I managed it easily in my old Subaru, so any car with decent ground clearance should be able to manage it when the road’s dry.

Unfortunately you can’t actually see the rock art at the moment as the wooden access walkway is closed due to weather damage, but it’s possible to bypass the walkway and with a bit of a scramble rejoin the circular walk to be rewarded with some fairly stunning views over towards the ranges

Makes a decent walk, and takes around an hour. Strange I never visited until now …

Almost the last item I catalogued at Dow’s was a cardboard box containing a bottle of Owbridge’s Lung Tonic with the contents still intact.

Lung tonics were common in the nineteenth and early twentieth century – in the days before antibiotics lung infections would hang on, especially in a damp cold winter, not helped by the smoke from coal fires and unregulated industrial air pollution.

Lung tonics were basically formulations to help you cough up phlegm and clear your chest, and occasionally contained something to relax you.

There were various formulations and products around, of which the most well known today is Fisherman’s Friend.

Originally a liquid tonic, Fisherman’s Friend was later thickened to make the lozenges we know today.

Fisherman’s Friends originated in Fleetwood in the North West of England, which was a major deep sea fishing port, and as an immediate hit with fishermen, who would have worked in cold wet conditions on the early steam trawlers. (I also suspect that to a man they smoked coarse pipe tobacco like bogie roll, which wouldn’t exactly have helped their respiratory health.)

Owbridge’s lung tonic was manufactured in Hull on the east coast of England. Like many nineteenth century patent medicines the bottles used were custom made and embossed with the name of the manufacturer, making them easy to identify, and usually made from a heavy glass which added to their longevity.

Hull, like Fleetwood, was a deep sea fishing port and had also been a whaling port, and like Fisherman’s Friend, Owbridge’s was popular among deep sea fishermen and whalers.

Owbridge’s disappeared in the 1960’s, and the factory has now become an apartment block, known as Owbridge Court, in Hull.

What I found particularly striking was the range of locations that Owbridge’s bottles had turned up in – Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, The USA and Canada as well as Jamaica.

Looking online, most of the bottles on sale on Ebay and Etsy are the heavy embossed pattern and seem to date from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s as opposed to the more standard screw top glass bottles used later.

I’ve already argued that the distribution of nineteenth century patent medicine bottles can be used to track increasing globalisation in the nineteenth century, the widespread distribution of Owbridge’s Lung Tonic bottles helps reinforce the point.

Nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia were perpetually short of medicine bottles. Even though Felton and Grimwade, who were originally a specialist medicine bottle importer, started bottle manufacturing in the early 1870’s, Australia was always short of bottles.

This is why quite a few early pharmaceutical bottles were embossed with something like

‘This bottle remains the property R J Higgs, Pharmaceutical Supplier’

And others would have paper labels saying that a deposit was payable if they were not returned after use.

It’s also why there was a steady trade in used bottles, or recycling as we would now call it, and indeed why during world war one and two organisations such as the boy scouts were encouraged to collect old medicine bottles for re-use.

What I didn’t realise, until recently, was that the trade in imported patent medicine bottles continued well after bottle manufacturing began in Australia.

For example, when the Fiji went down in 1891, off what is now known as Wreck Beach, as well as pianos and child’s toys, parts of its cargo included glass bottles made in Germany and destined for use by Bosisto’s.

Now when I’ve been documenting glass bottles at Dow’s I havn’t recorded any of the manufacturer’s marks on the base.

Early bottles didn’t have them, and by the 1920s all the local glass manufacturers (and there were only two or three at most) had combined to form Australian Glass Manufacturers, meaning that cast marks have relatively little value.

There were exceptions, Burroughs Wellcome tended to use their own bottles and have them embossed Wellcome or Burroughs Wellcome on the base.

But while reading about the wreck of the Fiji, the author mentions that Bosisto bottles were embossed Germany on the base.

I’m fairly certain we have no such bottles in the collection at Dow’s but it goes to show that it is worth checking manufacturers cast marks on early Australian bottles …

J, my partner in crime, is an accomplished artist.

While she does do the occasional landscape, what she really likes doing is drawing people and doing portraits.

And like everything, while innate talent helps, you have to practise, one of the exercises is life drawing, which is essentially the exercise of drawing naked people in a variety of poses to see how the body moves and changes.

And it’s not just drawing the young and lithe, the old and wobbly are just as important as subjects, perhaps more so, as being less taut their bodies change more with posture.

For example in this nineteenth century photograph from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, you can see how the subject’s body fat caused the body to be more solid and block like

Despite the fact we live in a rural area, there’s actually quite a healthy life drawing scene with groups of local artists clubbing together to hire a room and a model for a couple of hours.

All good.

Of course, during the pandemic this all stopped.

And J, like other artists, turned to the web for inspiration. There are a number of websites that host collections of images for use by people practising life drawing.

The images on these are not sexy or erotic, basically they are pictures of naked people of a variety of ages, ethnicities and genders, in a variety of poses.

This actually isn’t new or innovative.

Artists have used nude photographs of models ever since they became available, as in the work of Gaudenzio Marconi, a photographer working in Paris in the 1860 and 70s, who we knew took photographs for various artists working in Paris at the time, including Auguste Rodin.

Some of Marconi’s photographs are quite arresting as in this one of a female model posing as angel

I did try to find who commissioned this image, without any success, nor could I find who the model was, but using Google Lens to do a reverse image search, I did find an image on a Catalan auction site which seems to feature the same model in a less successful pose, perhaps suggesting that the artist was trying to find an image that worked.

I’m equally unsure why the image was commissioned – I’m guessing that it was for some devotional art or  a funerary monument rather than a Christmas card.

Marconi was not just a studio photographer. He was in Paris during the siege and the Commune and photographed some of the victims of both.

Back to the present day.

After the pandemic faded away, life drawing with real live humans became possible again and some of the life drawing websites shut down because they weren’t making any money, but slightly disturbingly, one of the websites that shut down said it was closing because the company hosting the site had deemed the content obscene and wished to terminate the hosting agreement.

The other thing that artists started doing was building up little collections of images such as those by Marconi, Muybridge and others, and putting them on photosharing sites.

Increasingly, they are being asked to remove these images as they are ‘not nice’.

Site owners, of course have a perfect right to change the rules as what they will and will not host.

However many of these site are run by American businesses, and there are some very strange things happening in America at the moment with the Christian right increasing in influence.

I don’t understand the ins and outs of American politics, and I’m very much of the view ‘their country, their rules’.

However, because American content hosting and sharing sites are so dominant we are at risk of importing their restrictions by default, and I think that’s something that needs discussion …

Earlier today I tooted about how the Scottish government had taken back control of the Caledonian sleeper from Serco. There’s an obvious parallel here with the Melbourne Adelaide train service, but that’s not my topic here.

For along time the Caledonian Sleeper was an anachronism, with elderly railcars rattling between Scotland and London depositing its unwashed passengers after an overnight journey.

Dating from a time before freeways and discount airlines it offered a way of getting from Scotland to London overnight without losing a day travelling.

When I’ve been back to the UK  I’d occasionally looked at it as a semi nostalgic way to get to Scotland from London to visit family, but the general inconvenience of the journey counted against it – no showers, unpleasantly early arrival times into Glasgow or Edinburgh, and the sheer hassle of picking up a rental car from the central train station and battling through early morning traffic were all negatives.

Since I last looked into using it, it has been upgraded to a moderately swanky tourist experience.

Now, I’ve never actually travelled on the Caledonian sleeper as was – when I was a young man and needed to get to mainland Europe from Scotland I usually got a daytime train to London, and then the overnight boat train – no Channel tunnel then – which sounded romantic, but if you were travelling economy was a fairly basic experience invariably involving a train from Dieppe to Paris at a time you’d rather not be awake.

However, I did use the Edinburgh Bristol sleeper on a few occasions. Now forgotten, it used to run, not surprisingly, from Edinburgh to Bristol via Birmingham.

Catching it to or from Birmingham, which I did several times, was bad news as it meant a midnight or thereabouts departure before being dumped in Edinburgh at about half past six, meaning you only really got about six hours sleep. Travelling the other way meant you had to get off just before six, and where possible I tried to get a daytime or evening train the night before.

However an economy sleeper ticket was more pleasant than sitting up overnight in an economy coach, which was usually some old compartment based ex-LMS coach that looked as it had last been cleaned in 1948.

If you did travel the whole way to Bristol it was better, they gave you tea and biscuits on arrival, and they didn’t chuck you off until after seven. That, and there used to be a place on the concourse that did a decent bacon and tomato roll and a cup of coffee, before getting a train on to Wales.

Coming back wasn’t too shabby either, they had a nice waiting area for sleeper passengers with a pleasant bar and you could get something half decent to eat. Unfortunately, the arrival in Edinburgh wasn’t quite so pleasant, but at least you’d usually had a decent night’s sleep.

I used to find I slept well on these old rattly railcars – while the train wasn’t the smoothest or the fastest I found the rocking motion quite relaxing, much as I found the Sunlander back in 2014.

But it’s strange. While the news is full of the Caledonian sleeper’s renationalisation, there’s very little online about the old 1980’s sleeper services, it’s almost as if they never were …

It’s no secret I like crime novels. In fact one of my favourite forms of relaxation at the end of the day is to read some decent well written crime fiction for half an hour or so before dropping off to sleep.

It can’t be any old rubbish. It has got to have a plot complicated enough to engage and well written to allow me to suspend my disbelief

Basically it has got to feel real.

At it’s best, good crime fiction tells you things, sometimes uncomfortable things, about a society and how it works.

Much the same can be said for these foreign language cop shows on SBS. They’re a society talking to itself, and in search of verisimilitude, they mention those aspects of life that are less than stellar, such as the prejudice against black Israelis and overseas guest workers in Israel, or the exploitation of illegal migrant workers in the Spanish fruit and vegetable industry.

And so it used to be with spy fiction. It had to feel real, You had to smell the dark tobacco smoke and black espresso at some meeting to make things seem real. And when I went to Budapest a few years ago I was astounded at how Keleti station was still just as shabby and atmospheric as I had imagined it.

But spy fiction doesn’t work anymore. The world’s changed. Carrying out an SQL injection attack against some unsecured foreign database from an anonymous open plan office in a building in a business park on the outskirts of Novosibirsk or Basingstoke doesn’t have the same drama as a furtive meeting in a Bucharest cafe to pass over a film cartridge containing pictures of some secret document.

There’s no atmospheric exotic scene to conjure, there’s no secret police watching – apart from the Serco guys watching the CCTV, and they’re supposed to be on your side, and at the end of the day, your paid hacker gets in their car and drives home to a microwave lasagne and a glass of wine.

Yes, obviously you could make drama there, and there have been some credible attempts to write modern spy fiction but they lack the grittiness of classic espionage fiction, and in a sense slide into crime fiction – you hacker’s partner is kidnapped in an attempt to find out who knows what about what, but many of these really play on how, quite often, the traditional authorities don’t quite understand what is going on.

Events such the Marcus Hutchins saga and Clifford Stoll’s, tracking down of a hacker don’t seem to have inspired much in the way of spy novels, perhaps because some authors are uncomfortable with explaining the technology, or even perhaps they fear that some of the technical details might be beyond their audiences.

Whatever the reason, we don’t yet seem to have a George Smiley or Harry Palmer for the twenty first century …