Daily Life in the Nineteenth Century441
a German doctor suggested the steam sterilization of
instruments in 1896.
Pasteur, Koch, Semmelweiss, Lister, and others
greatly improved the human condition, but none of
their work was more welcomed than were the discover-
ies of anesthetics. Untreatable pain was a fact of life in
- The agony of being fully conscious in a dentist’s
chair, in a delivery room, or on a surgical table was one
of the nightmares of existence before 1846 (see docu-
ment 23.1). Before the discovery of anesthetics, pa-
tients might have been drugged with alcohol or opium,
but they were more often expected to bite down on a
bullet. The greatest skill of a surgeon was speed in cut-
ting the body.
Sir Humphrey Davy, a British chemistry professor,
discovered the anesthetic property of nitrous oxide
(laughing gas) in 1800. His laboratory assistant, the dis-
tinguished chemist and physicist Michael Faraday, dis-
covered the similar properties of ether in 1815. No
medical application was made of these discoveries until
dentists began experimenting with ether and chloro-
form in the 1840s. Dental success led in 1846 to the
first major surgery (a leg amputation) performed on a
patient under anesthesia. British physicians began to
campaign for the adoption of anesthesia in 1847. Pro-
fessor James Young Simpson, a Scottish obstetrician,
introduced the use of anesthesia in childbirth and cam-
paigned in the British medical journal, the Lancet, for the
adoption of his procedure. The medical profession ac-
cepted anesthetics in surgery at once but resisted them
in the delivery ward. Many still held that the agony of
childbirth was God’s will in telling Eve “in sorrow thou
shalt bring forth children.”
Food and the Vital Revolution
The vital revolution of the nineteenth century was not
simply a history of medical science. The increased
availability of food and the improvement of diet also
played a significant role. Well-fed people resist illness
better and live longer. The average European diet of
1850 or 1890 was neither as diverse nor as nutritious as
the diet most Europeans enjoy today, and it appears
dreadful to most modern readers. However, historical
perspective again demands that one compare it with
the diet of earlier centuries; seen in that context, the
nineteenth-century diet represented a significant
improvement.
The simplest proof that the European diet im-
proved during the nineteenth century is that Europeans
grew taller. At the beginning of the century, the aver-
age soldier—selected for good health and strength—
stood between 5′ 1 ′′and 5′ 2 ′′tall. Napoleon conquered
Europe with warriors of that stature. To be sure, there
were variations in height. The aristocracy had a much
better diet and already stood closer to 5′ 6 ′′. The aver-
age height of west European soldiers did not reach 5′ 6 ′′
until 1900, when some countries produced averages of
5 ′ 7 ′′. This growth can be explained only by dietary
changes. No institution kept similar records of the
height of women across the century, but the average
height was clearly below 5’ in 1800 and across that line
by 1900.
Dietary improvements arrived slowly, with signifi-
cant variations by social class. A study of the Belgian
city of Antwerp in 1850 found that the population of
Illustration 23.3
Antiseptic Surgery.Joseph Lister
experimented with carbolic acid in
surgery to apply Louis Pasteur’s germ
theory of disease transmission. Lister’s
carbolic acid spray, shown here, effec-
tively prevented infection during surgery
and began the age of antiseptic medi-
cine. Note, however, that in this 1882
surgery the physicians still wear their
street clothes and do not use face masks
or surgical gloves.
