Jan Bondeson

"A successor to his book A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, this new collection of essays by Jan Bondeson illustrates various anomalies of human development, the lives of the remarkable individuals concerned, and social reactions to their extraordinary bodies." "Bondeson examines historical cases of dwarfism, extreme corpulence, giantism, conjoined twins, dicephaly, and extreme hairiness; his broader theme, however, is the infinite range of human experience. The dicephalous Tocci brothers and Lazarus Colloredo (from whose belly grew his malformed conjoined twin), the Swedish giant, and the king of Poland's dwarf - Bondeson considers these individuals not as "freaks" but as human beings born with sometimes appalling congenital deformities. He makes full use of original French, German, Dutch, Polish, and Scandinavian sources and explores elements of ethnology, literature, and cultural history in his diagnoses."--Jacket.

Before museums there were cabinets of medical curiosities: a dried mermaid might sit next to a giant's shinbone; the skeletons of conjoined twins beside an Egyptian mummy. In this well-illustrated book, the author uses his medical expertise to explore some of these medical freaks, outright frauds and popular myths. He debunks some as mere superstition and offers medical diagnoses for other cases. He explores such bizarre phenomena as spontaneous human combustion; snake and frog colonies living in a person's stomach; and vicious tribes of tail-bearing men. Bondeson also tells the story of Mary Toft, who gained notoriety in 1726 when she allegedly gave birth to 17 rabbits. The book also presents the tragic case of the "Ape Woman", a Mexican Indian with thick hair growing over her body and a massive overgrowth of gums, who was exhibited by her husband throughout her life, and mummified on her death in 1860.

Presents illustrated instructions for constructing masks, disguises, and costume accessories and for applying simple makeup.

Following her coronation in 1838, Britain's Queen Victoria was a very frightened young woman. She was being relentlessly pursued by a strange teenager, Edward "the Boy" Jones, who had an uncanny ability to sneak into Buckingham Palace without being detected. Once, he entered her bedroom and stole her underwear, and twice he sat on the throne. "If he had come into my bedroom, how frightened I would have been," the Queen wrote in her journal after the Boy Jones had been hauled out from underneath a sofa in her dressing room. As a result of his multiple intrusions into Buckingham Palace, the Boy Jones became a media celebrity. His exploits were the subject of popular verse, songs, and prints and lewd newspaper speculation about what he had really seen in the young Queen's dressing room. Fearful that he might injure or even assassinate the Queen, or kidnap the Princess Royal, the government of Prime Minister Lord Melbourne wanted to get rid of the Boy Jones at all costs. But "simple trespass," even into Buckingham Palace itself, was not a criminal offense. However, the government was so fearful of what tales the Boy Jones might tell about the various intimate details he had seen when spying in the Queen's private rooms that Jones was twice tried in camera and sentenced to three months in prison by the Privy Council. He remains the last person to have been given this dubious honor. Since the Boy Jones kept stalking the Queen, Lord Melbourne's government took the extreme step of kidnapping him on board a ship bound for Brazil. When he returned, he was again kidnapped by government agents and forced to serve as a sailor in the Royal Navy for more than five years without charge or trial. Queen Victoria's Stalker is the first full-length account of the Boy Jones's persistent stalking of Queen Victoria and the journalism and literature inspired by his intrusions. By comparing this case to other instances of celebrity stalking and discussing various theories of stalking mentality, Jan Bondeson offers a fresh analysis of this unique and unclassifiable case