Word: marsden
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Masturbation Cure. Women shed no tears over Celestine Doudet when she was tried in Paris in 1855 for beating five young girls, sisters-one to death. The children's father, a fashionable English physician named James Marsden, had put them in the Frenchwoman's charge so that she might cure them of masturbation-a practice that Victorians believed caused epilepsy, asthma, paralysis and madness. Doudet's qualifications for this task were obscure; she had previously been employed as a wardrobe mistress to Queen Victoria, who gave her a warm testimonial...
...Paris apartment, Doudet began her course of treatment. She tied the children's wrists and ankles to the bedposts-a common method approved by their father. She also kept them on a starvation diet and subjected them to nasty tortures. On a rare visit to Paris, Marsden attributed his daughters' rickety, emaciated appearance to their persistence in the "secret vice" and ordered up some "preventive belts." Another physician who called upon the girls made a similar diagnosis...
Even after this tragedy, Marsden was reluctant to press charges against Doudet, fearing that exposure of the girls' vice would stain the family honor...
...Brian G. Marsden, lecturer on Astronomy and director of the International Astronomical Union, said he realized Kohoutek had discovered two comets when a Japanese observer saw Kohoutek's comet moving in a different direction from that plotted by Kohoutek...
Kohoutek though he had seen one comet twice, but actually had seen two different comets, Marsden said...