Jan Bondeson's The London Monster (A Sanguinary Tale) is a marvelous look at the city of London in the 1790's through a horrifying story of terror and mania and a touch of humour. The tale will travel through the dark streets filled with shrieks as a stalker prowls along cutting both women's garments and flesh into the taverns where the Monster hunters gather and to the Old Bailey and the somewhat farcical trials of young Rhynwick Williams. The author keeps the story moving along at a brisk pace while yet still creating more than sufficient atmosphere for the reader almost to taste the London fog in the air while reading. In the last chapters he helpfully expands the scope of the book to give the reader a broader perspective on the case. A very entertaining and informative read to be saved especially for the history buffs when the nights grow a little longer and the wind howls just a little louder.

Even as I write, the region of Delhi, India, is in the grip of a panic: a mysterious "monkey man" is attacking people all over the area, scratching them with long metal claws! At least two people have died in a panic attempting to escape after someone cried that the monkey man had come, falling downstairs or off roofs. However, in no case is there the slightest physical evidence, either of an attacker or of an attack.

In what I believe is his fourth book, Jan Bondeson tells us all the facts concerning a possibly similar case in 1790 London, in which the "London Monster" slashed women with a knife (or a blade hidden in a nosegay of artificial flowers, or with spurs fixed to his knees or his toes, or, or, or...). Was this a case of mass panic, as in India, or was it the work of one man, or the confluence of many otherwise independent "copycat crimes," and was the man arrested, convicted and sentenced guilty or innocent? Bondeson covers all the possibilities in an admirably even-handed manner.

London in 1790 was a strange place to modern eyes, and perhaps strangest of all was the almost total absence of any law enforcement agency. In the rare instances that people were convicted of crimes, the death penalty was meted out for even the most trivial offenses. In one of the most notorious cases, a starving woman picked up a bit of linen, perhaps tempted to steal it, but lost her nerve and immediately put it back. Observed by the shopkeeper, she was brought before a magistrate, tried, convicted and executed! Bondeson gives us all the needed background to appreciate all the circumstances of the "London Monster" case.

In fact my only reservations about the book involve its printing. Only two fonts are used, a text font that is quite unattractive to the eye, and an italic font which does not match in either size or style to the normal text font. The very yellowish paper used makes the ink seem much greyer than it actually is, and the book overall is a very unattractive (and unfortunately very typical) university press product. It might pay to wait for a mass-market trade paperback.

Everyone knows of Jack the Ripper, but you probably don't know of The London Monster. You won't forget him after reading _The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale_ (University of Pennsylvania Press) by Jan Bondeson. Bondeson is a physician who lives in London, and whose previous books include _The Feejee Mermaid_, a look at various "unnatural" specimens like fake mermaids and vegetable lambs. His current book is a gothic-comic history, full of unnatural specimens such as a hero known as "The Catamite" and "The Cowardly Fishmonger," unreliable alibi witnesses who worked in an artificial flower factory, corrupt judges, and The Monster himself, Rhynwick Williams, or maybe it wasn't.

The Monster had a career of crime not of disemboweling his victims as his criminal descendant The Ripper did, but of following them in the street, insulting them, cutting their clothes, slicing their buttocks, and making his foul and stealthy escape into the night. He also would approach a woman, insist that she examine the bouquet of artificial flowers he carried, and then cut her with a blade concealed in the bouquet. His exploits were heavily covered by the press; one reporter wrote that certain ladies had been "wounded by some MONSTER (for such the perpetrator of such horrid deed must be, as there was not one but laid strong claims to beauty)." His career lasted from 1788 to 1790, and Bondeson lists fifty-eight women who were his supposed victims. Such a list is highly questionable, because of the notoriety of The Monster. Newspapers, poems, caricatures, and posters for rewards (all well reproduced here) meant many false leads.

Not only has Bondeson described the career of The Monster with verve and humor, but he has given a brief history of similar episodes of "epidemic hysteria." While it is true that there was a Monster, and he did cut ladies up, the exaggerated response of the public was similar to the phantom gas attacks by the nonexistent Mad Anesthetist of Illinois in 1944, or the Halifax [England] Slasher of 1926 in which people were cut up, but it turned out they were cut up by their own selves. Bondeson has thrown light on the forgotten crime spree that was a sensation in its time, and has given a picture of how justice, and tabloid justice, worked two hundred years ago. A sanguinary tale indeed.

Author/physician Jan Bondeson's work, THE TWO-HEADED BOY & OTHER MEDICAL MARVELS is itself a marvel -- it is a sensitive, humane discourse on cases in teratology (the study of congenital malformations). The word teratology derives from the Greek root 'terato' which is often translated as "monstrous" or "freak", however it also means "wondrous" and "marvelous". Dr. Bondeson never loses sight of his subjects' humanity and focuses on the wondrous aspect of teratology.

Dr. Bondeson's work is well-written and meticulously-researched. He discusses teratology cases from the Middle Ages through the Victorian Era, often providing contemporaneous illustrations and an occasional photograph. The book reads like a good mystery novel with Dr. Bondeson as the detective offering alternative medical explanations for accounts which, otherwise, would seem questionable if not outright incredible.

although we are taught that our interests in "freaks" is wrong and twisted, Jan Bondeson challenges this idea and takes us back to a time when such curiosity was normal and accepted, and some freaks were like rock stars. This book is intelligent, well written, insightful and very interesting. With excellent research Mr. Bondeson shows us how these people lived, some of their joys and many of their sorrows. He deconstructs some of the mythology that surronds these people and their stories. He shows us formost that they are simply people. I highly recomment it.

"A Cabinet Of Medical Curiosities" is an interesting book. I expected better photos, not hand drawings.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and even more recently), medical and natural history museums combined elements of science and folklore with an infatuation for the bizarre and grotesque. Thus, they were often likened to the old-time "cabinet of curiosities", displays of disparate and unusual artifacts which bore no relationship to one another. A visitor to these museums often saw things which, in later years, became the staple of carnival side shows.

In "A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities", Jan Bondeson, a British physician who also holds a doctorate in experimental medicine, has written a fascinating and brilliantly executed textual analogue to the cabinet of curiousities. In successive chapters, Bondeson details, among other curiousities, the histories of spontaneous human combustion, apparent death and premature burial, maternal impressions (the belief that what a pregnant woman sees and experiences can cause corresponding alterations in the unborn fetus), and people with tails. Bondeson tells true, and not so true, stories of dwarfs and giants. He relates the story of Mary Toft, the English woman who, in 1726, was believed to have given birth to seventeen rabbits. And, of course, such a compendium of marvels would not be complete without a bearded lady--in this case, Bondeson narrates the remarkable life story of Julie Pastrana, who made appearances throughout the world in the mid-nineteenth century and whose mummified body (along with the mummified corpse of her infant child) continued to draw crowds at fairs and carnivals many years after her death.

While these topics may seem grotesque, even repulsive, Bondeson writes with deep feeling for his human subjects and a wry sense of humor for the foibles of his sometimes credulous profession. He also integrates these seemingly freakish and disparate topics into remarkably lucid and informative discussions of their place in the medical, scientific, religious, and literary discourse of their times.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and even more recently), medical and natural history museums combined elements of science and folklore with an infatuation for the bizarre and grotesque. Thus, they were often likened to the old-time "cabinet of curiosities", displays of disparate and unusual artifacts which bore no relationship to one another. A visitor to these museums often saw things which, in later years, became the staple of carnival side shows.

In "A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities", Jan Bondeson, a British physician who also holds a doctorate in experimental medicine, has written a fascinating and brilliantly executed textual analogue to the cabinet of curiousities. In successive chapters, Bondeson details, among other curiousities, the histories of spontaneous human combustion, apparent death and premature burial, maternal impressions (the belief that what a pregnant woman sees and experiences can cause corresponding alterations in the unborn fetus), and people with tails. Bondeson tells true, and not so true, stories of dwarfs and giants. He relates the story of Mary Toft, the English woman who, in 1726, was believed to have given birth to seventeen rabbits. And, of course, such a compendium of marvels would not be complete without a bearded lady--in this case, Bondeson narrates the remarkable life story of Julie Pastrana, who made appearances throughout the world in the mid-nineteenth century and whose mummified body (along with the mummified corpse of her infant child) continued to draw crowds at fairs and carnivals many years after her death.

While these topics may seem grotesque, even repulsive, Bondeson writes with deep feeling for his human subjects and a wry sense of humor for the foibles of his sometimes credulous profession. He also integrates these seemingly freakish and disparate topics into remarkably lucid and informative discussions of their place in the medical, scientific, religious, and literary discourse of their times.

If you are at all interested in medical oddities, natural history, or a sideshow history, this is very interesting. It goes through the histories of a few oddities: the title character, the lerned pig, animals in rocks, and smart mules. it also reconstructs a continuum, especially in the case of the mermaid, of how these artifacts and oddities have been used and why people are interested in them. Also it explains how these seemingly impossible things have happened. Very interesting to anyone of a science or social science background.

If you have any interest in the history of biology, this book is for you. It contains ten investigations into natural history at its most weird: learned pigs, barnacle geese growing from trees, vegetable lambs, showers of fish and toads, and the world's cleverest performing horse. The Feejee Mermaid of the title, half a monkey and half a salmon, had a long career in 19th century show business and beyond. A remarkable chapter deals with the criminal prosecution of animals for a variety of offenses, from the middle age onwards. One of the book's great strengths is that it successfully couples a wealth of historical data with modern science; this enabled Bondeson to actually solve the riddle of the Basilisk, a mythical creature born from the egg of a cockerel.

Jan Bondeson is apparently a British physician, and not a full-time historian of science. This would explain the book's vivid and readable prose, far from the normal turgid jargon of the 'academic'. Most of the essays are beautifully written, with contemporary quotations in poetry and prose effortlessly woven into the text. Sometimes I found, however, that the book had a lack of cohesion and overall theme. But in the book's best chapter, about spontaneous generation throughout the ages, Bondeson provides a remarkable and unique contribution to the history of biology. He uses his up-to-date knowledge of science to demonstrate that the same long-lasting ideas about generation of living tiaaue can be found in Aristotle's writings and in modern theories about the origins of life.

In the early part of the seventeenth century, Jacques-Benigne Winslow, a Danish anatomist who lived and taught in Paris, claimed that, "it is evident from Experience, that many apparently dead, have afterwards proved themselves alive by rising from their shrouds, their coffins, and even from their graves." Winslow suggested that the means for determining death were unreliable and, hence, there was a widespread risk of being buried alive. Winslow went on to write a detailed compendium of alleged cases of premature burial, mixing fact with folklore and creating a kind of Ur-text for what subsequently became both a widespread popular fear in Western Europe and an at-times respected (if sometimes eccentric) intellectual and social movement for measures to eliminate the risk of premature burial.

In "Buried Alive", Dr. Jan Bondeson, professor at the University of Wales College of Medicine, traces the history of the fear of premature burial in Western Europe and the United States, a fear that attained its clearest popular expression in the macabre literature of writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, but which had a much more significant, albeit less well known, intellectual history. Beginning with Winslow's treatise, which was written in Latin and known by few outside the Parisian medical profession, Bondeson carefully explores how Winslow's work was translated into French, and popularized, in the mid-eighteenth century by Jean-Jacques Bruhier, another French physician. While Winslow's Latin treatise would have been confined to the dusty archives of history, Bruhier was a great popularizer and his translation and expansion of Winslow's book was widely read and translated in France and other countries of Western Europe. From this popularization, there developed a widespread popular fear of premature burial, as well as a legitimate medical debate about how to determine whether a person was dead or alive.

The popular fear and the professional debate went through many iterations. In Germany, Christopher Wilhelm Hufeland, a practicing physician, published an article in 1790 which outlined a plan to erect a house for the dead in his hometown of Weimar. The idea was based upon the general belief that the only reliable means of determining death was the onset of putrefaction. Popularizing an idea originally suggested in Bruhier's work, Hufeland's proposal was avidly endorsed within Germany and led to the construction of numerous waiting mortuaries or "Leichenhauser", where the dead were attached to alarm devices to detect movement and identify those who were not, in fact, dead and also to observe the onset of putrefaction. Indeed, Leichenhauser continued to exist into the twentieth century in Germany.

In England and the United States, both the popular and medical concern about premature burial arrived much later. Indeed, it was only in the nineteenth century that the English and Americans began to give any credence to the fear and to the medical issue and, even then, it largely became the short-lived domain of spiritualists and charlatans. It did result, however, in the development of a number of ingenious security vaults and other coffins and burial devices intended to allow the person buried alive to survive and signal those in the world of the living of their grim fate. Perhaps the most well known of these devices was the so-called "Bateson's Belfry", a coffin which allowed its still living inhabitant to ring a bell that stood above the grave, presumably permitting a post-interment rescue.

"Buried Alive" is a fascinating and methodical exploration of the fear and the intellectual and social history surrounding the idea of premature burial in Western Europe and the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. However, unlike Bondeson's earlier work, "A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities", which never ceased to fascinate and entertain, "Buried Alive" is much more like an academic treatise, a book which certainly has suitable rewards for the reader, but which is written in prose that is dry as bone.

While it's title suggests a melodramatic and lurid tale, Jan Bondeson's book Buried Alive is actually an historic account of a growing preoccupation with anti-mortem burial that started during the 1700's in Europe and did not decline until the early 20th Century. While many of the stories that the author recounts from the pamphlets, periodicals, and book length works of that time period were indeed colorful, they were also for the most part just as much works of fiction as the stories on the same topic by the famed 19th Century novelist and poet Edgar Allen Poe. It seems entirely likely that Poe's work itself may have been influenced by the sensational journalism of the time.

Bondeson notes that there are strong components of sadism, necrophilia, and fantasy about most of the stories of premature burial and an almost folktale continuity among some of the stories from one country to another. As he points out, when reliable authorities undertook to investigate the underlying story of a premature burial as reported in some of these accounts, they almost unanimously discovered that the stories were pure fabrications used to sell newspapers or to encourage the public to buy specially designed coffins, build special hospitals for the dead, or simply purchase an author's book or support his cause.

When Bondeson analyzes the descriptions of the supposed victims of anti-mortem burial, he makes it clear that totally normal causes for their disarray can be proposed, but that the data supporting more rational interpretations were either unavailable at the time or were ignored for the sake of a good story. It's not that he feels that this type of disaster is impossible or that all stories of misdiagnosis are confabulations. Quite the contrary. In assessing the accounts, he points to several that he believes might have been real. He also defends the fears at the time as not totally unrealistic and is unwilling to label individuals who took precautions against such an occurance as "phobic."

Interesting too is the inverse correlation that he points out between the rise in the fear of awaking in a coffin and a general decline in confidence in the medical establishment of any given period. He notes a similar modern day fear being declared dead prematurely that occurred during the 1980s and 90s when medical practitioners were uncertain about the exact criteria for declaring an individual dead, as transplant became a viable form of treatment and viable organs scarce, and as prolonged life support became more successful. At just what point such support becomes a prolongation of the dying process is still a burning issue in many countries, as the book How We Die makes very apparent.

Since I work in a teaching hospital on a surgical intensive care unit and have been confronted with a number of the ethical issues associated with death and dying and with the concerns of family and friends over the well being of family members at this stage of life, I found the book of considerable interest. The historic effect of the media on public opinion and its not always altruistic agenda were also of interest.

The book is probably not as entertaining as one would expect from the title, but it is very interesting and informative as history. It's certainly a very carefully researched and lucid account. For those who are more interested in the process of death and dying and the current ethical issues associated with it, I would suggest the previously mentioned book, How We Die. For those interested in classic spooky tales on the subject, I'd suggest a collection of the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe.

This book presents a fairly gruesome subject in a manner that makes it difficult to put the book down. This history of one of humanity's greatest fears makes for a very informative and interesting ("lively"?) read.