How did they treat Alexandra's ear infection if antibiotics didn't really exist in the early 1900's?
I'm not even sure they did treat it. After the death of Princess Elisabeth of Hesse in Skiernewice in 1903, Alexandra got a cold and inflammation of the ear. I think Miss Eagar wrote that Alexandra kept to her sofa/bed for a period of time as long as six(?) weeks. Would it have taken so much time to cure an ear infection with antibiotics?
Two things strike me about this episode: one being the extraordinary amount of personal, medical detail which found its way into the press! In the
Times they describe the infection with gruesome precision, right down to discharges and so forth. Imagine the complaints of current royalty being detailed in this way!
(Conversely I am sure that if Alix were a U.S. President they certainly WOULD include every personal detail; I have seen this done).
The other thing that struck me was that she was just pregnant with Alexei when this happened, and I wondered if the otitis media were used as a cover for not moving her while she was suffering badly from morning sickness, but without making an official announcement (since her previous pregnancy had been the one that disappeared, for whatever reason).
I am pretty certain that antibiotics DIDN'T exist at this date, except perhaps any natural antibiotics used in homeopathic medicine. I understood that the first commercially manufactured antibiotic was penicillin, around the time of the Second World War, but I see that some people also count Salvarsan, a product used to treat syphilis, which was available only from circa 1910. Edited to say: we should recall that Alexandra's cousin died from a very similar ear infection, now easily treatable with antibiotics - mastoiditis being the result if unlucky of untreated otitis media.....(and my grandmother, born in 1910, almost died as a child from the same thing, for lack of antibiotics)