‘Proved on the pulses’: heart disease in Victorian culture, 1830-1860

In 1841, The Times reported an inquest on Honoria Brien, a young woman who died unexpectedly in a state of poverty and starvation. The cause of her death was recorded as heart disease: largely, it seems, due to a witness who reported that Honoria told her ‘my heart is so compressed, and I am sure it is breaking’.¹ A sense of ‘compression’ in the chest does have some authority as a symptom of cardiac illness, but the chief weight of the statement lies in the theory of heartbreak. The inquest could interpret a figurative expression as a physical event, and was supported in this by medical authority. ‘Violent feelings not only agitate, but may kill the heart in a moment; in short, broken hearts are medical facts’, wrote the medical and philosophical writer James Wilkinson in 1851.² In the same decade, but in a different discourse, William Gladstone argued, in a review of Tennyson’s poems, that passion and feeling were vital aspects of contemporary life, concluding, ‘Does any one believe that ever at any time there was a greater number of deaths referable to that comprehensive cause a broken heart?’³ Honoria’s death from a broken heart, it seems, was a peculiarly Victorian cause, one supported by both literature and medicine.