There have been a number of speculations surrounding the death of Constance Lloyd, wife of playwright Oscar Wilde, who was famously tried and imprisoned for “gross indecency” (AKA being gay) in 1895.
Lloyd passed away three years after her husband was sent to prison. After falling down a flight of stairs and injuring her back, she underwent emergency surgery and died shortly thereafter. She was 39 years old.
For over 100 years, one of the common theories surrounding Lloyd’s death was that it was all the result of a weakened spine due to syphilis caught from her philandering gay husband. Now, Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, has just discovered a trove of over 130 private family letters that clear up the mystery surrounding his grandmother’s death.
The letters reveal symptoms modern doctors commonly associate with multiple sclerosis, including losing the ability to walk, chronic gain, headaches, and fatigue. Lloyd, it now appears, was falsely diagnosed by not one but two separate doctors.
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One of them was an unnamed German “nerve doctor,” whose treatments involved hot baths and electricity. The other was an Italian man named Luigi Maria Bossi who believed that Lloyd’s physical ailments could be cured with gynaecological operations.
After falling down the stairs and injuring herself, Lloyd went to Bossi for a gynaecological procedure, during which she slipped into a coma and died.
“People somehow never put two and two together and thought: ‘Why is a gynaecologist operating on her spine?’” Holland tells The Guardian.
The family never pursued legal action against Bossi because Lloyd had consented to the operation despite several warnings against it by other doctors.
“It cost her her life,” Holland says. “Ultimately, both Bossi and the hapless Constance met their ends tragically–he by the bullet of an assassin and she by the knife of an irresponsible surgeon.”
(Bossi was later shot and killed by a patient’s incensed husband some 20 years after Lloyd’s death when he was accused “unethical behavior and professional misconduct.”)
Lloyd married Wilde in 1884. After he was imprisoned for homosexual acts in 1895, she changed her and her sons’ last name to distance themselves from the scandal and fled to Genoa. She and Wilde never formally divorced.
Holland says he hopes this new evidence will bring an end to speculation over his grandmother’s untimely death.
“I rather feel it will put Constance to rest,” he says. “Poor thing.”
h/t: The Guardian
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demented
So it can be boiled down to “really bad Victorian medicine.”
PRINCE OF SNARKNESS aka DIVKID
I don’t know how true it is but I read somewhere that Oscar And his, um, tight circle didn’t go in for any “back parlour” action!
Bosie Douglas ended up a prominent fascist and virulent anti-semite and, naturally, a witchhunter of homosexuality in any form. The quintessence and model of all future rightwing self-hating homos.
MarionPaige
The TV Show The Kink showed the horror of early medicine in New York.
onthemark
@MarionPaige: You mean “The Knick” (fictional Knickerbocker Hospital) – good show!
jwtraveler
“chronic gain”?
inbama
@PRINCE OF SNARKNESS aka DIVKID: Be careful or you’ll be accused of “bisexual erasure.”
jockjack5
Mercifully, and hopefully, it will REMAIN a mystery.
zzzz…
Clark35
Oscar Wilde was not gay, he was bisexual. To deny this is bisexual erasure.
demented
@Clark35: Yes, he was very in love with his wife during the early years of his marriage, including sexually. Letters show that, and he didn’t need to fake it because in Victorian times, NOT expressing erotic sentiments to a marriageable lady would have been okay.
I guess he was fluid and moved more to men sexually, but he never did stop loving her, since he went to Geneva to put flowers on her grave even though he was sick.
inbama
Wilde certainly had no concept of sexual orientation as we understand it today.
As far as his wife goes, we are talking about the man who coined the phrase “the love that dare not speak it’s name” which he explained at his trial as “exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him…It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection.”