Friday several
I keep meaning to mention this: I think I may have posted at some time about my friend who wrote a well-received book on what happened to the children of British women by black US GIs after the war (not an edifying story on the side of either government: the US Army authorities would not give per for interracial marriages to take place; British govt very reluctant to permit children to be adopted by willing US fathers; etc etc). She has now put up an online exhibition based on her work. She managed to find quite a number of these children and their families and there were a lot of them present when the book had its launch. (I see the book isn't in the Manchester UP sale but then it isn't actually normally priced at an eye-bleeding level.)
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Another gruesome story: The baby-selling scheme: poor pregnant Marshall Islands women lured to the US. 'Dozens of women from the Pacific island victims of brazen trafficking ring that operated for years'. I wish one was less surprised to hear that the kingpin of the noxious scheme started out as an LDS missionary to the islands...
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This is a lot less incongruous than it may at first sound: British Pregnancy Advisory Service is setting up fertility network to address inequalities in provision: BPAS has been the main not-for-profit UK abortion provider since 1968, when it was realised that some regions of the UK were places where the local medical establishment were embargoing the abortions that had recently been made legal within NHS institutions. But, historically, going back to Marie Stopes and the other early birth control clinics: these were also - within the limits of what they were able to accomplish in those days - trying to help women who desperately wanted to conceive and couldn't.
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News about Kent that isn't about wall-to-wall lorries - Two people are being sought to manage a small herd of wild European bison (Bison bonasus) being introduced into Blean Woods, near Canterbury, to help restore the woodland for wildlife. Ummmm. Bison are quite large animals and I'm not really sure that I see rural Kent as having quite enough of the wide open spaces that I would consider necessary...
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I offer this as a potential source for assorted historical novels - I think one may imagine several ways it could go, even without a doc who had anglicised his name to Frankstone... ‘Invalids Wanted’: Residential care in the 19th century: On the face of it there are obvious potential reasons for the motivations of physicians to place such adverts. First is charity. It is entirely possible that philanthropically-minded ‘medical gentlemen’ with room to spare in their storeyed townhouses were simply following their natural, and perhaps religious, instincts to relieve suffering by taking a patient in to provide dedicated care. Second, having a patient ‘live in’ offered medical practitioners the time and space to perfect their therapeutic techniques, or even develop new ones. It is also worth noting that, while money isn’t usually mentioned, the assumption was presumably that the patient would contribute something to their keep, so financial reasons perhaps offered another incentive. Perhaps the most plausible reason behind such advertisements were new ideas about the treatment of the sick and infirm from the early decades of the nineteenth century, and beliefs in a ‘change of air’ as a potential restorative cure for many ailments.
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