Edmund Gosse and the "new and fantastic cure" for breast cancer.

One of the landmarks in the history ofmodem biography is Edmund Gosse' s Father and son, first published anonymously in 1907. This book broke away from the tradition of eulogy and rhetoric in biography and gave a realistic portrayal of the complex relationship that existed between a father and son in mid-Victorian England. To the medical historian it is of interest because the third chapter describes the death of the author's mother from breast cancer, in 1857, and gives details of her treatment by "a certain practitioner" who offered "a new and fantastic cure" for this disease.' The aim of this paper is to investigate that treatment, identify its origin, and determine why it was adopted. In his day, Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) was one of the most influential figures in English literary life, indeed H. G. Wells referred to him as "the official British man of letters".2 How he rose to this position, and became not only the acknowledged friend of Tennyson, but the confidant of R. L. Stevenson, Thomas Hardy and Henry James, is intriguing and has been the subject of a recent biography.3 He was born in London in 1849, the son of the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse (1810-88) and his wife Emily (1806-57). After a private education in Devonshire, in 1867 he became an assistant librarian in the British Museum and soon became associated with the pre-Raphaelite movement. In 1875 he was appointed a translator at the Board of Trade and in the years that followed he acquired a reputation for literary criticism, as well as publishing biographies ofJohn Donne, William Congreve, and A. C. Swinbume. In 1884 he was appointed lecturer in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then in 1904 Librarian to the House of Lords. Despite his prodigious reputation at the time of his death, the majority of his writings are now largely forgotten; one book, however, remains and has become a classic, namely, Father and son, a study oftwo temperaments. Although it was published anonymously in 1907, the identity of its author was immediately recognized, and the book became an immediate success on both sides of the Atlantic. Nonetheless, many of its readers were shocked by its frankness, and its rejection of the conventions of Victorian autobiography. In the book's preface, the author claimed it was a "scrupulously true" account of his development from a child until he left home at seventeen.4 Little clinical detail is given of