The early days of the history to Thanet tourism, medicine, magic and madness

This picture "The Bathing Place at Ramsgate" which was painted by Benjamin West painted around 1788 is one of the earliest local paintings by a fairly well known artist and so likely to be accurate.

To decode what is going on the picture a bit, the naked man, bottom right, Has come to Ramsgate for the cure. The crutch he is carrying denotes that he is ill, the mug in his hand denotes the that he is going to drink seawater after which the professional dunkers are going to hold him under the water. They will do this every day for several months depending on the doctor's prescription.

Of course being wealthy enough to afford medical treatment, he will have rented a house in Ramsgate and will have with him his family, hangers on, servants with him. Swimming costumes, deckchairs and so on are yet to be invented. An interesting public spectacle attracting the men on the harbour wall armed with telescopes. Even the woman on the top of the cliff near the edge and carrying a small child will probably have to wait about 140 years to get arrested.

From around 1735 people started coming to Ramsgate and Margate not for seaside holidays but for the cure, it took some time for this to develop into holiday-making.

Medicine moved fairly slowly until fairly recently, on the whole if as far back as anyone wrote anything down up until well into Victorian times, when someone was ill it was generally assumed the illness was cased by a mixture of magic and religion, science took over from the late 1800s.

Cambridge University has just released the transcripts of some of two of the most prominent doctors operating around 1600, academic websites - while having no irritating advertising take a bit of getting used to but this one is well worth having a bit of a click about'

Here is the link

If you failed the Cambridge University website there is a BBC news article about the work.

Here is the link 

Work wise a fairly busy week in the bookshop, my favourite book in the batch that went out yesterday is American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Essentially a novel about the problems gods face when people stop believing in them.

Here is the link to the photos of the books 

On the personal front I did a bit of painting

Don't expect a lot of detail in the sketch as it is A5 size

took a few photos

Here is the link to the photos I took today

A lazy day off today, sat outside on the sundeck of The Royal Victoria Pavilion aka Wetherspoons Ramsgate, we sat under one of the covered bits as it rained on and off and I painted. On a fairly warm day with light rain like today I don't think it would have been easy to find a better place.

A few old Margate pictures

A couple of Ramsgate

This is Harbour Parade at the bottom of Harbour Street in Victorian times The Albion Hotel was demolished to make way for a bank which is now Pizza Express

A couple of Broadstairs ones