Kaye Jones

On December 8 1841, Arthur Edmunds, the brother of the notorious Chocolate Cream Killer, was baptised in Margate. Arthur was the baby of the Edmunds family; the seventh and last child who, like so many of his siblings, has a sad tale of his own.   Like his sister, Christiana, Arthur was born into considerable wealth and luxury: he lived in one of the finest houses in Victorian Margate, had an army of servants to tend to his needs and his father was one of the most successful architects in the South East.   But when Arthur was 9 or 10 years old, everything changed. He received a blow to the head and started to have seizures and violent mood swings. After a consultation with the family doctor, Arthur was diagnosed with epilepsy, a condition which was considerably misunderstood in the nineteenth century.     For the Victorians, epilepsy was a form of madness, chiefly associated with ‘degenerates’ and ‘idiots’, and primarily caused by excessive masturbation. Tre...

There’s something very sad about reading a death certificate. It doesn’t matter if you knew the person or not or if he or she died over 150 years ago. Reading the details of a person’s death fills me with a sense of poignancy and, over the last few years, I’ve read so many relating to Christiana Edmunds' nearest and dearest. But there’s one death certificate that has really stood out and not because it had me in floods of tears. Louisa Edmunds, one of Christiana’s younger sisters, allegedly died from having a heavy period and there’s something a little bit WTF about a death attribution like that. In fact, her death certificate cites “menorrhagia for some months” as the primary cause of death and lists “exhaustion and effusion” for five days as the secondary causes.       Menorrhagia is a term still used by doctors to denote heavy menstrual bleeding but I can’t find any modern references to show that death is a possible consequence. That’s not to say that...