"Consumptive Chic"

See the Smithsonain Mag Story "How Tuberculosis Shaped Victorian Fashion"

Marie Duplessis, painted by Édouard Viénot

And an interesting quote from a story specifically about her:

In 1847, shortly before 23-year-old Marie Duplessis, one of 19th-century Paris’s most celebrated courtesans, died of consumption, she told her maid, “I’ve always felt that I’ll come back to life.” Her prophecy came true: she found enduring fame in the work of a former conquest, Alexandre Dumas fils, “La Dame aux Camélias” (there’s a newly translated version by Liesl Schillinger, a regular contributor to the Book Review), as well as in “La Traviata,” the opera Verdi based on Dumas’s novel and play.

Victorian Exercise Machines

more HERE

Victorian Sex Tips

Because Cosmo has nothing on THIS article in Salon.

A few examples:

In the book, Becklard states: “The mouth of the uterus, be it known, is very narrow, so narrow in fact, that the fecundating principle would not enter it, but that it craves it, and inhales it by real suction — a proof, by the way, that a rape can never be productive of real offspring.”

…

If one is trying not to beget a child, Becklard advised that, immediately after the conjugal act has occurred, “dancing about the room before repose, for a few minutes, might probably have that effect.” This is, of course, contrary to logic (and to the plot of Dirty Dancing, which is where we get all of our sex advice).

…

another book titled Sexual Health: A Plain and Practical Guide for the People on All Matters Concerning the Organs of Reproduction in Both Sexes and All Ages by Henry Hanchett, encouraged parents “to run their children around throughout the day in wild play so the children would be too tired to masturbate before bed.” Female children weren’t much of a concern, as they were believed to have a “low, almost nonexistent sex drive, so only truly deranged females would succumb to the temptations of masturbation.”

And so much more HERE

Because things got weird in the Victorian Era too

See THIS ARTICLE on Victorian Occultism and Synesthesia from The Public Domain Review