Mummified Mary

11 May 1940

It’s the 86th anniversary of the cremation of Mary van Butchell, which would be entirely unremarkable had she not died in 1775, and met her fiery end due to the ministrations of a WWII bomb.

That is not her, because I couldn’t find an image I was sure was her, but is of her husband, Martin, who was (according to a book called The Natural History of Quackery)

undoubtedly the most colourful of all Dental Quacks. He practised in the 1770s and made ‘real or artificial teeth from one to an entire set, with superlative gold pivots and springs: also gums, sockets and palate, formed, fitted, finished and fixed, without drawing stumps or causing pain’. With such a repertoire one would have thought van Butchell needed no further advertisement . But this was the Golden Age of English Quackery and competition ran high.

“Without drawing stumps” there does, indeed, mean he fitted false teeth over your rotten old ones without yanking them out – not really avoiding pain, then, but postponing it.

Anyway, Martin felt the need to stand out from the crowd, so he grew a huge beard...

and rode a white pony. in the park and to his place of work in carrying as he rode a stick made of human bone. The pony was painted each day, sometimes with large purple spots, sometimes it was painted a bright purple.

(That, incidentally, is from a different source: a paper called Quacks Through The Ages from the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts in 1957 by one Arthur Dickson Wright – father to Clarissa…)

ADW describes our man as “a very theatrical person” and “a born advertiser, without a trace of self-consciousness” who was “at first ... a simple quack selling nostrums and claiming to cure anal fistulae” but branched out into dentistry. (Yes, this post is essentially about Martin, not Mary. I suspect that’s how he wanted it, and historians since have deemed him more interesting, so that’s what I have to go on.)

(Also: a digression which is quite horrid: if you should happen to wondering what a fistula is – WELL...)

Anyway, when Martin’s wife died, he decided he wasn’t quite ready to part with her and got Scottish anatomist William Hunter to embalm her (so, no: ‘mummified’ in my title isn’t correct, but alliteration for the sake of it)…

and the body was injected with preservatives and colour additives to add a glow to the corpse’s cheeks. Dressed in her wedding gown with a fine set of glass eyes, her body was embedded in a layer of plaster of Paris in a glass-topped coffin, and displayed in his front room. Rumour suggested there was a clause in his marriage settlement that allowed him use of her property only while she remained above ground, or maybe it was an extreme publicity stunt.

(Apparently, the corpse proved such a popular attraction van Butchell was obliged to put an advert in the St James Chronicle announcing that he would restrict the numbers flocking to see it.)

Arthur Dickson Wright adds:

Dressed in a ‘fine lace gown,’ she was always introduced by van Butchell as his ‘dear departed,’ and the Quack was said to have enjoyed a period of domestic tranquillity never previously experienced . Eventually, van Butchell felt he needed something more in the way of feminine company than a woman in a glass case , and remarried.

You may not be entirely surprised to hear that the second Mrs Van Butchell was less keen on the presence of the first Mrs van Butchell in their parlour than was Mr van Butchell, so she was sent off to the Hunterian Museum. An incendiary bomb landed on the place on this day in 1941, and she was finally cremated – or, as ADW puts it:

one of the strangest methods of advertising disappeared for ever.

Bonus random nonsense

Today is also the 53rd anniversary of this panegyric to pints, this paean to porter, this… er, pondering of pissedness:

...and it’s the 122nd anniversary of the birth of Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí of Púbol, who wanted to make a film with the Marx Brothers called Giraffes on Horseback Salad, but... didn’t.