HISTORY · ANECDOTES
Jan Bondeson
Jan Bondeson is a Swedish-British rheumatologist, scientist and author, working as a senior lecturer and consultant rheumatologist at the Cardiff University School of Medicine. Outside of his career in medicine, he has written several nonfiction books on a variety of topics, such as medical anomalies and unsolved murder mysteries. In a 2003 interview, Bondeson told Publishers Weekly, "I've always had a profound interest in history, especially the history of medicine, and a bit of a fancy for the macabre and odd." Bondeson is the biographer of a predecessor of Jack the Ripper, the London Monster, who stabbed fifty women in the buttocks, of Edward 'the Boy' Jones, who stalked Queen Victoria and stole her underwear, and Greyfriars Bobby, a Scottish terrier who supposedly spent 14 years guarding his master's grave. - Wikipedia
IF ONE wishes to go back in time more than two hundred years to study the daily life of the Londoners in 1790 and how it was disrupted by the terror and rage caused by the London Monster's crimes, the best resource to consult is the Burney newspaper collection at the British Library.
— from The London Monster, 2000
Most acclaimed
A cabinet of medical curiosities
1997
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.
The London Monster
2000
"A century before Jack the Ripper haunted the streets of London, another predator held sway. In the late eighteenth century, the City was gripped by fear, outrage, and Monster Mania. A psychopath who had lashed out violently at over fifty women during a two-year crime spree roamed the city." "In June 1790, an ungainly young Welshman named Rhynwick Williams, who worked in a factory for artificial flowers, was arrested as the London Monster. He appeared an unlikely Monster, with a reasonable alibi for one of the worst attacks. But after two long, ludicrous trials, where he was defended energetically by the eccentric Irish poet Theophilus Swift, Williams was convicted." "Was Rhynwick Williams guilty? Or was he unlucky enough to fall into the hands of authorities when they needed someone, anyone, to pay for the Monster's peculiar crimes? Was there even a Monster at all? Considerable doubt has been cast. In The London Monster, Jan Bondeson writes a lively, detailed account of one of London's most notorious sons and assesses evidence for the guilt or innocence of the convicted Williams. He presents a wealth of contemporary evidence from learned and popular sources, as well as research on mass hysterias and moral panics, to reinterpret Monster mania and compare it to historical and modern instances of similar phenomena. Indeed, in the magnitude of public frenzy it incited, the story of the London Monster bears similarities to the Ripper murders in 1888; in its stature as urban legend, it is of the bogeyman tradition of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. As Bondeson reveals, the London Monster occupies a unique space in London's criminal history and imaginations somewhere between fact and fiction."--BOOK JACKET.
Buried alive!
"Readers of Edgar Allan Poe's tales - just think of The Premature Burial - may comfort themselves with the notion that Poe must have exaggerated: surely people of the 1880s could not have been at risk of being buried alive? But such stories filled medical journals as well as fiction, and fear in the populace was high. It was speculated, from the number of skeletons found in horrible, contorted positions inside their coffins, that ten out of every one hundred people were buried before they were dead." "With over fifty illustrations, Buried Alive explores the medicine, folklore, history, and literature of Europe and the United States to uncover why such fears arose and whether they were warranted. Jan Bondeson looks at legends from the Renaisance of thieves awakening supposedly deceased women when they try to steal the women's jewelry, as well as people awakening on the way to their funerals or even later in the graveyard. He then looks at the bizarre nineteenth-century security coffins with bellropes or escape hatches, and the macabre waiting mortuaries for decaying corpses, as well as the writers who were inspired to use themes as premature burial in their work. Finally, he questions whether our medical criteria today for determining if someone is dead are truly reliable."--Jacket.