John's sisters had moved away from Manchester when they married. His sister Mary was the tender-hearted girl who had secretly brought him food when he had been sent to bed in disgrace with no supper. He was only five and she was eight, and he had managed to fall in a muddy ditch though he had been expressly told not to get his clean clothes dirty.
When their mother died in 1852, Mary had missed her badly. She was the sister who wrote to Alice
I cannot tell you how I daily miss her even now and it seems to me that I can never feel so thoroughly at home here as before my dear Mother's death. Her love did indeed sweeten our lot. Dearly as I loved her I knew not fully what she was to us until we lost her [1]
Her gentleness can be seen in Alice’s description of her, when she wrote to John on 8 July 1866 after Mary's death
I have been thinking, dearest, it might be for the Glory of God and the education and encouragement of many if you could say something of our dear Mary in a Sunday School address. Her earnest piety, great prayerfulness, unobtrusive but earnest endeavours to bring others to Jesus, her gentle meek spirit, altogether there was such a sweet savour of Christ about her that it seems as if the perfume of such a life should be shed abroad [2]
Mary had married Charles Foulger Tubbs in 1844. She must have met him through her brother-in-law George Ibberson Tubbs, as they were half-brothers. Charles was a dentist and he and Mary settled in Plymouth where he set up practice. Alice went there herself for treatment in October 1850, and Charles Tubbs took out an old tooth for her. She wrote to John afterwards
On Saturday I inhaled Chloroform and had the old stump extracted. I was not wholey [sic] insensible to the pain, but felt neither wish nor power to help myself ... I felt no other effects from the Chloroform than great sleepiness the rest of the day [3]
Charles was keeping properly up-to-date in the latest developments in dentistry. It had only been in July 1848 that the 29 year old Francis Brodie Imlach had begun a lecture to the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh with the striking words
Early in November last, I extracted the first tooth ever drawn from a patient placed under the anaesthetic influence of chloroform
and that was only days after his friend and colleague James Young Simpson had first used chloroform in obstetrics. [4]
A reputation as an up-to-the-minute practitioner in painless dentistry could only be helpful to Charles, and he soon established himself successfully in Plymouth. This was fortunate as he was to have a very large family. By the mid-1860s they had moved into the countryside above the town, taking a large house called 'Mount Athos' (its earlier name was 'Athos Villa') where there was plenty of room and good fresh air. It even gave Charles the scope to do a little farming – in February 1874 he was advertising "ten fine South Ham ewes with fourteen strong lambs" for sale in the Western Morning News. Their nearest neighbours were the Rookers at 'Mount View', so Mary had the support – possibly sometimes rather overbearing and didactic, it must be admitted – of her forceful elder sister Elizabeth.
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| OS. c1854-1863 Mount View & Athos Villa (National Library of Scotland) |
But in 1866 Mary died. This was the second of two traumatic deaths in childbed that year, a deep affliction for Alice who was pregnant herself. Lizzie died on 14 May and Mary on 26 June.
We have lost two sweet sisters; but not lost; we know where they are and would endeavour to rejoice in their joy
wrote Alice to John in her letter of 8 July 1866 [5]. On 30 September her twelfth baby was born and died. This was the summer when Alice became increasingly unwell and ever more dependent on her 12 year old daughter Nelly.
Mary died aged 43 at the end of her eleventh pregnancy. The death certificate shows that something had gone very wrong. It reads "Extra Uterine Fetation [Foetation] 9 months".
So she had been pregnant for nine months when she died. Possibly, as the doctor certified, the pregnancy was abdominal – an ectopic pregnancy that had, very unusually, reached term. In 1880 ectopic pregnancies had a mortality rate of 72% to 90%. Or possibly there had been some terrible complication with labour, or the baby had died in the womb and she had not gone into labour but had become very ill, and the doctor had interpreted what he saw on examination as a pregnancy outside the womb.
Only two years earlier there had been a report from St Bart's Hospital in London which contained a discussion of "Missed Labour" (that is, the child dying in the womb and labour failing to come on) and how this should not be confused with a pregnancy in the abdominal cavity, nor with premature labour producing a decomposing ovum. In those days it was not easy for doctors to distinguish between them. [6]
Whatever had happened, it must have been an appalling situation for everyone. Charles, now 50, was left with their nine surviving children – the eldest was Charles Ernest, a 20 year old engineer, and then came seven daughters, ranging from Mary aged 19 to Alice aged 2.
Notes
[1] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. XXX
[2] ibid., p. 48
[3] ibid., p. 17
Chloroform’s first use in dentistry: the making of an RCS Edinburgh dental president. Author: Robin Fixter-Paterson
[5] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 48
[6] St Bartholomew's Hospital Reports on the causes, diagnosis, pathology, and treatment of Missed Labour, with illustrative cases. By Robert Greenhalgh, MD 1864
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