Many guardians mistake the symptoms of brain fever and may delay treatment, resulting in fatal outcomes. “The novelists who used brain fever were following medical descriptions, not inventing them,” she writes-and expressing the terrors of a time before modern medicine.Brain fever (Meningitis ) depicts a medical disorder where a part of the brain becomes inflamed and induces signs that show as fever. And as Peterson explains, just because descriptions of illness may seem old-fashioned and inexact today doesn’t mean they were entirely made up. Nineteenth-century doctors didn’t have access to antibiotics or even understand how contagion worked. The prevalence of these fevers in old novels illustrates how scary sickness could be. Tarini believes that the term was inaccurately used to describe viral meningoencephalitis in Mary Ingalls, whose disease rendered her completely blind.
But this term, too, may have been used to refer to meningitis or encephalitis. It afflicted everyone from Little Women’s Beth March to the real-life Mary Ingalls’ fictitious counterpart in the Little House on the Prairie books. Then there was that other nineteenth-century fever-scarlet fever. This gave female fever victims an unmistakeable appearance in an era that prized long locks. Fevers were used by authors as literary devices that allowed characters to mature or realize their true feelings. Women’s hair was often cut off during their illnesses both to lower the patient’s temperature and prevent pesky maintenance issues. Overexerted women were thought to be particularly susceptible to brain fever, which was treated by wrapping patients in wet sheets and putting them into hot and cold baths. Just because descriptions of illness may seem old-fashioned and inexact today doesn’t mean they were entirely made up. Rather, “both physicians and laymen believed that emotional shock or excessive intellectual activity could produce a severe and prolonged fever.” However, it’s unclear if all “brain fevers” had their roots in contagion.
“Many of the symptoms and the post-mortem evidence were consistent with some forms of meningitis or encephalitis,” writes Peterson. “Brain fever” came to mean an inflamed brain-one characterized by headache, flushed skin, delirium, and sensitivity to light and sound. Rather, people of the era saw it as a suite of symptoms seated in the brain.
BRAIN FEVER MEDIA CIRCULAR STUDIO 1.2 HOW TO
Peterson explores the condition, what it meant for Victorians, and how to read it today.įirst of all, “fever” didn’t necessarily mean a high temperature to Victorians. These characters were fictitious, and often contracted their fever after experiencing intense emotions, but medical literature of the day shows that such symptoms were recognized as a distinct and very real illness by doctors.Īudrey C. What the heck is brain fever? If you’ve ever picked up a nineteenth-century novel, you’ve probably asked yourself this question-and given the frequency with which brain fevers afflicted fictitious, Victorian-era characters, you may have suspected it was a kind of faux public health crisis invented by novelists in need of a handy plot device.įamous fictitious victims of brain fever include Madame Bovary’s Emma Bovary, who suffers from brain fever after reading a brutal breakup letter from her lover Rodolphe, and Great Expectations’ Pip, who becomes direly ill after his father figure, Magwitch, dies.
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