The Duchess and the Doctors
David Green describes how, during her long life, the Duchess of Marlborough ceaselessly sought for a panacea against illness and disease.
Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, as she herself said, had no great opinion of any physician; and in an age of medical ignorance, this was hardly surprising. For doctors, at the Court of Queen Anne, one took one’s choice between Radcliffe (clever but temperamental), Arbuthnot (too friendly, for Sarah’s liking, with Swift and Abigail Masham), Mead (famed for having deliberately swallowed a viper’s poison without ill effect), or Garth (hugely corpulent and jolly, later to be knighted with Marlborough’s sword). One called them in, all or any of them, when one was desperate; but for everything short of that, Queen Anne (Mrs. Morley) and the Duchess of Marlborough (Mrs. Freeman) relied on their own remedies and commonsense.
From Queen Anne’s letters—and there are a number still unpublished at Blenheim—one is appalled not only by her miserable health, but by the grotesquely primitive way in which she ran her household. Here she is, for example, writing to Sarah, her Groom of the Stole, a letter headed simply ‘Monday, eleven o’clock at night’:
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