Victorian Grotesque Martin Howard 1977 First Edition Medical Curiosities Freaks

Description

Martin Howard goes digging through the stranger corners of nineteenth-century medical literature, popular entertainment and human curiosity in this wonderfully titled 1977 study. Drawing heavily upon period medical journals, published reports and private collections, Howard assembles accounts of anatomical anomalies, unusual medical conditions, addictions, extraordinary physical feats and the Victorian fascination with people whose bodies fell outside the ordinary. Chapters include “A Talent for the Bizarre,” “Incidence of Major Terata,” “Giants, Dwarfs, Fat Ladies and Living Skeletons,” “Human Smells, Addictions, Extraordinary Feats,” and “Strange Customs, Stranger Misfortunes.”

The period illustrations are really what make the book: engravings, photographs, advertisements and sideshow imagery turn it into a visual history of the Victorian appetite for the extraordinary. The rear jacket image alone is magnificent—Babil and Bijou, billed at London’s Alhambra in Leicester Square as the “Giant Amazon Queen,” standing beside a comparatively tiny gentleman and a nine-foot measuring scale. Part medical history, part social history and part cabinet of curiosities, this is exactly the sort of oddball book that rewards opening it at virtually any page.

For collectors of medical history, sideshow culture, Victorian eccentricity and the wonderfully strange—a book whose title tells you exactly why you need it.