Fashionable Gilded Age Ailments

To be “sick,”  Madame would be inelegant! –

Old-time “headaches,” too, do not obtain along the fashionable line as formerly, although Madame permits herself occasionally the French migraine when she doesn’t want to do something or see somebody that she ought; and, while she is never inelegantly “sick,” she “suffers” often from insomnia, and she is frequently a victim of 

“malaria.” – 

The name “malaria” originated with the Romans. The literal meaning is “bad air” as the Romans believed that the disease was a kind of miasma that was spread in the air.

Fashionable women, albeit they are “heirs” with the rest of “flesh” to various “ills,” have a way of cloaking their maladies in the parlance of society, thus effectually separating them from the sicknesses of the common herd. A certain sort of nerves is no longer in vogue. It is not good form to scream at a mouse or shrink from a spider; that sort of thing has gone out with the pale and sensitive Pamelas of a past generation. 

Old-time “headaches,” too, do not obtain along the fashionable line as formerly, although Madame permits herself occasionally the French migraine when she doesn’t want to do something or see somebody that she ought; and, while she is never inelegantly “sick,” she “suffers” often from insomnia, and she is frequently a victim of “malaria.” After too free indulgence in the pleasures of her table, provided, as it is, with many ices, salads, and rich compounds of the chef's art, she is apt to succumb to an attack of “nervous dyspepsia” that her physician is far too polite to tell her is merely the protest of an outraged stomach.

Since we have grown so English, “gout” and an “Indian liver” are complaints sanctioned within even the most exclusive circles, although plain rheumatism and a “bilious attack” are not strictly high-class affections. What Milady especially enjoys, however, if it be not too real, is an attack of nervous prostration that demands the “rest cure,” either here or abroad, with all its accessories of a fashionable doctor, massage, electricty, et al., and final evolution into becoming tea gowns and agreeable convalescence. – New York Times, 1890

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