An address on the medical history of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Pepys : Read before the Abernethian Society on March 6th, 1895 / by D'Arcy Power, M.B. Oxon, F.R.C.S. Eng., surgeon to the Victoria Hospital for Children.
- D'Arcy Power
- Date:
- [1895]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: An address on the medical history of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Pepys : Read before the Abernethian Society on March 6th, 1895 / by D'Arcy Power, M.B. Oxon, F.R.C.S. Eng., surgeon to the Victoria Hospital for Children. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![to persuade me that she should prove with child, which, if it be, let it come and welcome ” The hope was belied, however. In the following year, on Sept. 27th, 1664, he notes: “So home, where my wife, having (after all her merry discoarse of being with child) her months upon her, is gone to bed.” The Diary for several years contains an almost uninterrupted account of the pain from which Mrs. Pepys suffered monthly. It was so severe that it quite incapacitated her from doing any household work, and it usually compelled her to keep in bsd. She seems to have met the trial bravely, lying up when she was forced to do so, but getting about again as soon as possible. As time wore on the entries about the pain became fewer and fewer, so that the attacks doubtless became less marked. The pain during the worst period sometimes preceded the flow by a week, but it was more usually coincident with it, and in no case, so far as I can find, did it come on afterwards. It would, therefore, be of that variety to which the term spasmodic (neuralgic or obstructive) dysmenorrhcea is now applied—a condition which, as my friend Dr. Griffith points out to me, is often met with in childless women who have been married young. Mrs. Pepys had a long illness in the winter of 1663. It began, so far as I can ascertain, as an abscess in the vulva, though I think that it is more likely to have been ischio¬ rectal, pointing, perhaps, a little more anteriorly than is usual. It terminated in a fistula. The surgeon was called in, for Pepys records, on Nov. 16th, 1663, that “in the evening Mr. Hollyard came, and he and I about our great work to look upon my wife’s malady, which he did, and it seems her great conflux of humours, heretofore that did use to swell there, did in breaking leave a hollow, which has since gone in further and further, till now it is near three inches deep, but, as God will have it, do not run into the body ward, but keeps to the outside of the skin, and so he must be forced to cut it open all along, and which my heart I doubt will not serve for me to see done, and yet she will not have anybody else to see it done, no, not even her own mayds, and so I must do it, poor wretch, for her. To-morrow night he is to do it.” On the following day, however, “Mr. Hollyard [Thos. Hollier? one of Sergeant-Surgeon Wiseman’s wardens in the Berber Surgeons’ Company in 1665s] being come to my 3 The College of Physicians in 1669 bought his house and grounds extending fiom Warwick-lane to the City walls for £1200 to build a new college in place of the one destroyed by the Great Fire in 1666, which was situated in Amen-corner.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b30799193_0012.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
