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Pain

In which we wonder what Victorian diseases are still around today

Yesterday, I was idly wondering: does anybody suffer from “curvature of the spine” any more? Or was it just one of those Victorian diseases which you just don’t see nowadays?

You see, I remember reading, years and years ago, that Catherine Mumford, wife of anti-poverty campaigner and Salvation Army founder William Booth, suffered from it badly when she was a teenager. So much so, she was forced to spend a few years lying face-down in bed reading the Bible and writing letters about the evils of booze.* Today, though, you don’t hear about it very often. Does it still exist?

I spent a while thinking about it yesterday, googling up things like kyphosis and scoliosis. It’s still around, then – but is it common? Do people still get problems like that, or was it just a result of bad nutrition and poor mattresses?

And then, this morning, I woke up in rather severe pain. I couldn’t move, because my back was in agony. It’s stayed rather painful all day, albeit not as bad as it was when I awoke. Clearly, my spine has a twisted sense of humour.

* Thinking about it, though, her life probably wouldn’t have been much different if she had been allowed to leave her bed. The entertainment options for teenage girls in 1840s Lincolnshire were rather limited, and she was rabidly religious from an early age.