The Dead Leafs

Buy Me a Coffee

Dress

c. 1897

by Felix

L'Art et la mode, no. 14, vol. 17, 4 avril 1896, Paris. Théâtre du Vaudeville, Amoureuse. Dessin de M. de Solar. Bibliothèque nationale de France

Silk & Lace Afternoon Dress with Matching Hat

1910s

The doctors could see the connection between drinking and having sex with prostitutes but they couldn’t convince the men to stay home and sober, even though they warned them that during the first week of taking antibiotics they were still infectious and could still give the disease to someone else.

So they created the myth that you can’t mix antibiotics with alcohol or they won’t be effective anymore. Because men wanted to be healed they abstained from drinking and that got them to stay home.

Because this lie was created by male doctors, to this day there are people who still believe it. What men say is taken very seriously.

The women who were the victims of men’s promiscuity weren’t taken seriously even when they begged for their lives and for the lives of their children and even though the consequences of syphilis are devastating. So they too came up with a strategy of their own to try to keep men sober: they appealed not in their own name or in the name of the children these men didn’t care about, but in the name of God, because they knew men would sooner respect an imaginary male in the sky than a real woman in front of them.

So to this day they are painted as fanatically religious sour pusses who were just really really jealous and envious of how much fun men were having, gambling and fighting and catching their death of syphilis with prostituted women. Because that is such an amazing way to waste your life away and to introduce a devastating disease into your family home that who wouldn’t want in on that.

Martin Freeman Stunned By Syphilis Deaths In Family

Portrait of Lillie Langtry, 1877 - oil on canvas

An extant men's ensemble from c. 1833: coat and trousers of British make (Metropolitan Museum of Art collection).

Handbook of English Costume in the 19th Century, by Phillis and C. Willett Cunnington, describes the men's suit of the 1830s:

The tail coat was double-breasted or single-breasted; the cut-in now square; the collar high behind with rolled lapels turning low for full evening dress. The waist was rather short (until 1836) and the skirt at first scanty — ‘scarcely perceptible’ (1831.) — but becoming fuller and longer by 1838. The corners were rounded.

The sleeves, long and close-fitting, ceased to be gathered at the shoulders soon after 1832 although slight gathers sometimes persisted into the 1840s. The cuffs were usually slit (the French riding cuff) with two buttons in the cuff and sometimes two above; the corners of the cuff, from 1838, might be rounded off.