The nineteenth century

The nineteenth century in Poor Things is not merely a date range but a measure of uneven change: new medical practices and openings for women coexist with professional resistance, institutional exclusion, and unresolved secrets. Through accounts of events in the 1820s, the career of Semmelweis, and the Enabling Bill of 1876, the novel places its challenges to medical authority within a century in which progress is neither smooth nor secure.

A chronology of medical dissent

The account reaches back to the 1820s, when, according to Dr. Prickett, a demonstrator animated the corpse of a hanged criminal with electric currents. The subject sat up and spoke; public scandal was reportedly averted when another demonstrator cut the subject’s jugular. Sir Colin Baxter was present, and Dr. Prickett alleges that he passed what he learned to his son, Godwin Baxter. The episode links experimental medicine to the novel’s concealed history of Bella Baxter, while leaving the audience to confront the violence behind a spectacular claim of scientific power.

The century’s medical disputes also appear in Godwin Baxter’s account of surgery and hospital practice. He describes Sir Colin as an advocate of boiling instruments and sterilizing his operating theatre at a time when hospital boards ignored or denounced aseptic medicine. In his telling, surgeons continued using contaminated scalpels and bloodied coats rather than admit that their practices had killed patients. His example of Semmelweis sharpens the cost of that resistance: after using antiseptics in a Viennese maternity hospital and reducing its death rate from 12 to 1¼ per cent, Semmelweis was rejected by his superiors, forced out, and died in a mental hospital in 1865 from septicaemia he had deliberately contracted in a finger.

Hospitals, nursing, and professional authority

Godwin Baxter’s criticism is also directed at the class structure of nineteenth-century medical care. He presents public hospitals as places where doctors practiced on poor patients while seeking fees from the rich, who could instead arrange private operations or treatment at home. The account identifies his personal stake in this dispute: he remembers that he was barred from hospital practice except in the poorest charity clinics, a restriction that helps explain his bitterness toward the profession.

His polemic does not treat technical innovation as sufficient reform. Godwin credits improved hospitals to nursing and argues that nurses are the truest practitioners of healing; he even claims that most patients would recover if doctors and surgeons disappeared while nursing continued. The claim is deliberately sweeping, but its contrast is central to his view of medicine: humane care and attention to patients’ lives matter more than professional status or the authority acquired through dissection. The century’s medical history is therefore presented not only as a struggle over instruments and techniques, but as a dispute over who is trusted to heal.

Women’s access to medical education

The late-century prospect of women entering medicine appears through Godwin’s account of the Enabling Bill of 1876 and the work of Sophia Jex-Blake. He says that only four women doctors are then practicing in Britain, all with degrees from foreign universities, but points to Dublin University’s admission of women medical students as a sign that Scottish universities may follow. This juxtaposition makes progress visible while stressing how narrow the route remains.

Godwin proposes that Bella Baxter begin in the charity wards of an east Glasgow infirmary as a trainee nurse. If she succeeds under its discipline, he will arrange for her to assist him as a theatre nurse; later medical lectures would then build on practical experience rather than the memory exercises he associates with first-year study. He argues more broadly that doctors and surgeons should be recruited from nursing or begin their careers in it. When Bella says she wants to help little girls, mothers, and prostitutes, he supports the aim and advises her to keep her intention to teach effective contraceptive methods private until she is qualified. The advice makes education both an opening and a constraint: professional standing may give her room to act, but public advocacy is to wait.

Historical time and contested authority

These references give the century a layered structure. The 1820s demonstration, Semmelweis’s death in 1865, and the Enabling Bill of 1876 mark different stages in a history of experimentation, neglected evidence, and limited institutional change. They do not form a simple story of improvement: a practice described as saving lives can be rejected, while access to medical education remains exceptional even as new doors begin to open.

The historical claims also arrive through characters with different interests. Dr. Prickett uses the 1820s incident to connect Godwin Baxter’s family to disturbing experiments; Godwin uses medical history to indict hospitals and the profession that excludes him. The century consequently serves as both setting and argument. Its innovations create possibilities, but the question of who controls medical knowledge—and whose account of progress is believed—remains unsettled.