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Monthly Archives: January 2012

Snake Root, Bloodletting and Winners!

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I’ve been sick most of this week and Behind on Everything, so I thought I’d recycle this post from a few years ago. Old but still apropos.

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“People do not die of little trifling colds.”

But what Mrs. Bennett didn’t say is sometimes it feels like you could.

I’m so annoyed. The kids have just gone back to school and this was supposed to be my chance to reconnect with my writing. Instead, I’m battling a stuffy nose, the plugged ears, chest congestion, cough and interrupted sleep. Despite the vaporizer fogging our upstairs with eucalyptus steam and a full complement of medicines, traditional and herbal, I am just barely functional when I wanted to be blazing into the new story. It’s so not fair!

Anyway, I thought I’d check out one of my period sources on medicine. It’s DOMESTIC MEDICINE, by William Buchan, first published in 1769 with 18 subsequent editions. Buchan was pretty forward-thinking about general health and prevention and many of his suggestions are far less kooky than those of his counterparts (though that’s not saying much!) I think of it as the sort of book my heroines might have owned and used to help keep their families healthy during the happily-ever-after.

Anyway, here are some suggestions:

“THE patient ought to lie longer than usual a-bed…”

Please, Dr. Buchan, tell that to my kids!

“A SYRUP made of equal parts of lemon-juice, honey, and sugar-candy, is likewise very proper in this kind of cough. A table-spoonful of it may be taken at pleasure.”

This sounds very nice.

“If the pulse therefore be hard and frequent, the skin hot and dry, and the patient complains of his head or breast, it will be necessary to bleed, and to give the cooling powders recommended in the scarlet fever, every three or four hours, till they give a stool.”

I checked some of the recommended medications, and they include “Peruvian bark” and “snake root”. Googling these exotic terms, I learned that Peruvian Bark is also called cinchona bark, and can still be used to treat fevers. Seneca Snake Root has expectorant properties. OK, so far, Dr. Buchan is not so dumb.

However, I don’t think my medicine cabinet contains any Peruvian Bark or Snake Root…

And the bleeding I could definitely do without!

Here’s another tidbit.

“MANY attempt to cure a cold by getting drunk. But this, to say no worse of it, is a very hazardous experiment.”

Aw, I’m willing to try it at this point. It couldn’t make me feel any worse, could it????

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I’m still not up for bloodletting, but I am grateful for: Advil Cold & Sinus, echinacea and green tea. As a bonus, this week I watched Northanger Abbey (the delightful 2007 version) with my older daughter, who was also sick and off school for a day. I’d been promising her this ever since we read the book together, and it certainly made us both feel better!

How do you comfort yourself through a cold?

And congratulations to the following winners of a Kindle or Nook copy of SAVING LORD VERWOOD. Please send your email address, and if you wish, the email address of a friend who might enjoy a copy, to elena @ elenagreene.com (no spaces). Also, please be sure to let me know if you want Nook or Kindle.

Karen
Lorraine
Maria D
Helena
CrystalGB

Elena
www.elenagreene.com
www.facebook.com/ElenaGreene

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Time-Traveling Spies Eating Steak and Salad with Their Kids!

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There are a few things in romantic fiction I don’t care for; they include spies, people eating steak and salad in contemporaries (why is it always steak and salad?!?), children who do not act like children, and telling a story using time period shifts.

But forget the kids and the food; I am currently reading Joanna Bourne’s The Black Hawk, and damned if I’m not liking it, despite it being about spies and using time period shifts to reveal the story.

Bourne’s use of language and description is incomparable–it’s as close to Kinsale and Ivory as it can get without being anything like either of those. Plus I like that her hero isn’t hugely tall or overly buff without reason:

The muscles of his belly, his shoulders, his arms, were stark as rocks jutting from a hill, smooth as peeled wood. He was a fierce and violent simplicity, like a force of nature. There was not the least softness upon him anywhere.

I have had to tell myself to be patient as the story unfolds. But it’s worth it. And shows me that all rules–even my own!–are meant to be broken, if the circumstance is extenuating enough (I have to say, though, that the cover guy looks very little like how I picture Hawker. But I’m reading on my e-reader, so I don’t see the cover a lot).

What are your reading idiosyncracies?

Megan

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End of an era

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I’ve been wondering whether to blog about this or not but on the other hand it’s been on my mind. Two weeks ago I showed you a picture of two people a century apart in age, one of whom was my father. He died very peacefully last Sunday after living rather too long and with increasing mental and physical frailty. I saw him last in 2010 and he didn’t really know who I was but accepted cups of tea from me, some of which he said were lousy. Sorry, dad.

Think about it: a hundred years. His mother, at the time of the 1901 census, was 20 and a housemaid in London (possibly a family secret I unearthed) at 28 Alma Square in Marylebone, London, something I now incorporate into my presentation on Regency servants. The house is still there (thanks, google maps, although I don’t know which one it is! It is now a VERY posh area. I don’t think it was in 1901). There’s a lot I don’t know about his family because he wouldn’t volunteer information or talk about them, and he’s the last of his generation by a long shot. He was of Irish descent and his grandfather (who came over from Dublin) drove a hansom cab in London. When he was a very small child he was put on a train to visit relatives and was given chocolate to cheer him up by young soldiers who were going to the front in World War I.

He gave me my appreciation of music and books. I thought everyone went to sleep listening to their father play violin accompanied by their mother on piano. Wrong. Here he is in a local community orchestra, as a youngster of 92, playing that most geeky of instruments, the viola.

He and I had a very nice Jane Austen moment one time when I was a rebellious teenager and we weren’t getting along too well. Somehow we got onto Jane Austen, and I said I liked Emma best and he said he liked P&P, particularly the smackdown scene between Lizzie and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and we then read it together. I’m trying to think of a way to incorporate this into the funeral service at the end of this month. And if I ever need to think of the way a Regency person would say something, I recall my father’s way of speaking, which had a very old-fashioned cadence. So I owe him a lot.

He read my first book, Dedication, but by then his memory was already going and he had trouble connecting thoughts. He did however comment that he’d be too embarrassed to donate the book to the church jumble sale.

We had some memorable moments when he and my mother visited the States a couple of decades ago. He may have been the only person ever to take a mule ride in the Grand Canyon wearing a necktie (he didn’t feel properly dressed without one). And he was thrilled to find a “Sod and Sodding Services” section in the yellow pages. English people used the term “turf.” Over there, “sod” and “sodding” mean … something else. I cut it out for him and he took it back home to show people.

It’s the end of an era. I’m sad he’s gone but when someone lives this long you have expected it for a long, long time. So don’t feel bad for me, but do tell me about any interesting ancestors you may have!

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Downton Abbey Whacha Think?

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People Magazine (1/9/12) gave Season 2 of Downton Abbey a rather negative review:

“What’s that new building next to Downton Abbey? The proportions are off, the materials look cheap–is it prefab? Oh: It’s season 2.”

Our own Janet is less enamored of the series than I am. But I must say, I enjoyed the first episode of Season 2. The obvious reason (besides the beautiful settings and fashions, which do not disappoint!) is to find out what will happen to Lady Mary and Matthew, Bates and Anna, but one thing I particularly liked about this episode was the way the writers threw more complexity into the characters.

For example, I didn’t have much sympathy for Thomas in Season 1. He was a pretty thorough villain, but in this episode, we see another side of him, something of his personal pain. Same for O’Brien. For both Thomas and O’Brien, it was a glimpse of their personal pain that captured my interest, as well as a kindness in them that had not been evident before.

I saw an unexpected side of Edith, too, one that made me like her better and one that made me want to cheer her on.

So, building from Megan’s blog of last Friday, about sexual tension between romantic characters, I realized that there were other elements of story that hook me. Show me the character’s pain. Show me a glimpse of their good side and suddenly I care and I want to know what happens to them, whether it be in a movie, a mini-series, a soap opera, or a book.

What about for you? What hooks you into a story? Have you ever been hooked on a show or a book series that you’d reluctantly confess to even your closest friends?

What did you think of the first episode of Downton Abbey?

I’ll announce Anne Gracie‘s winner after midnight today! So keep your comments coming on her guest blog, as well.

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