QI The Book of the Dead

supervision by Maria’s husband, Philip.
    Helena was sprightly and energetic into her mid-eighties, vigilant for the smallest error. Her granddaughter, also named Helena in her honour, recalled the Comtesse shrieking hysterically at the staff because one of the blue silk covers on her bedroom door-handle had fallen off. The glare from the naked brass was, she said, damaging to the eyes. A similar theory led her to replace the lower half of all her windowpanes with red glass, which, she explained, was both healthier and more cheerful. And cows were essential. As well as fresh milk, they produced methane: her herds were always encouraged to graze near the open windows of her houses. She suggested to her grandson Philip that instead of enrolling at medical school he should become a vet, thus contributing much more to the good of humanity. She said she had read in the Royal Agricultural Review that ‘children brought up on good milk seldom become drunkards’. If Philip switched to veterinary medicine, she promised, she would give him some money from the sale of land in England, which would otherwise be going to help needy Armenians. He declined.
    On one occasion, Maria and her children were summoned to the south of France to mingle with polite society. They were under strict instructions to accept no invitations to afternoon tea at five o’clock. This was the hour when the Comtesse believed most people caught the flu, not by mixing with other people but because there was a dangerous ‘miasma’ in the air at the end of the day. One of her visitors made the mistake of wearing high heels. After the Comtesse had asked to examine them, she threw them on to the fire. Flat, broad shoes, she always said, were better for the general health and, in 1866, she wrote a letter to the Medical Times and Gazette extolling the benefits of going barefoot:
    Look at the magnificent gait of a barefoot Highland girl and the elastic play of every muscle, and compare her feet with those of girls who have been tortured in boots, too short or too narrow at the toes…As for cleanliness, feet freely exposed to the air are not offensive, but the smell of unwashed feet enclosed in dirtier stockings and shoes is very unwholesome, whereas no one ever felt disgusted at the little bare brown feet of Italian peasant children .
     
    When Helena de Noailles died, her doctors said she had lasted longer than expected, subsisting largely on a diet of champagne and, of course, fresh milk.
    In her will, she endowed an orphanage for the daughters of clergymen, where, even after death, her regulations lived on. Any potential inmates were to have their skulls examined by two independent phrenologists, to ensure that they were ‘firm spirited and conscientious’. None of the girls was to be vaccinated – the Comtesse believed vaccinations led to other illnesses – and no girl under ten was to be taught any mathematics except for multiplication tables.

     
    There was nothing remotely cranky about George Fordyce (1736–1802). He was a respected doctor who fought against quackery, exposing the ineffectiveness of treating epilepsy with a forehead paste made from ground-up elk’s hooves, and producing important theses on fever, smallpox, diet and metabolism. He also conducted experiments in heated rooms that proved for the first time that the human body could effectively regulate its temperature whatever the environment.
    But Fordyce was as famous for his poor bedside manner as he was for his medical expertise. With his patients he was blunt and taciturn: a consultation usually consisted of asking his patients to stick out their tongue and have their pulse taken. ‘That will do,’ was his usual pronouncement before writing out a prescription.Born in Aberdeen, he came from a family of high achievers: two of his brothers were doctors, one a Presbyterian minister, one a banker and one a professor. At fourteen he gained his MA from Aberdeen University and spent several years apprenticed to his uncle, a doctor in Rutland. Returning to Scotland, he graduated in medicine at Edinburgh when he was only eighteen. His curt manner may have been exacerbated by the tragic loss of both of his sons in childhood, one of them by drowning in the Thames. He also had two daughters, one of whom married Samuel, brother of Jeremy, Bentham.
    Fordyce gave lectures that were renowned for their thoroughness – and their length. For over thirty years, they took place each morning at