sawyl | Classic Victorian illnesses

Over coffee today, I mentioned that one of Pater's protégés had had that quintessentially Dickensian disease: quinsy. Basically, she'd had bad tonsillitis for a few weeks and hadn't bothered to do anything about it until it became so bad that she couldn't eat, couldn't open her mouth and felt really spaced all the time. She decided to drive down to the doctors and get it checked out. After the doc had heard her symptoms, he told her to open her mouth and, when she couldn't really do it, pulled it open and squinted down her throat with a torch. He was so surprised to discover that she had quinsy that he went round and go the other partners to come in and take a look cuz most of them hadn't such nasty, abscessed tonsils outside of a med school text book.

It's just such an impressively retro disease to have. It's like going to hospital with an attack of the ague or twittering rigor or something.