Ms
Johnson was Maria Van Butchell's inseparable
companion for 125 years, they were exhibited side by side in the Hunterian
Museum and perished together in 1941 in the conflagration that followed the
direct hit on the Royal College of Surgeons by a fire bomb during the blitz. In the 1830 museum catalogue
she was described as “the embalmed body of a female subject aged 24, of the
name of Johnson , who died of phthisis in the Lock Hospital, about the year
1775 and left her body for dissection to Mr Sheldon, who was at that time a
pupil of that charily…..Presented by Mrs Rebecca Sheldon Dec 24th 1808.”
Ms
Johnson’s embalmer John Sheldon, anatomist and surgeon, was born 6 July 1752 in
Tottenham Court Road. He was educated at Harrow and apprenticed to Henry Watson
the professor of anatomy at the company of surgeons. He trained at the
Westminster and Lock hospitals and in 1774 became resident pupil to John
Hunter. After a year in the Lock Hospital he was appointed Lecturer in Anatomy
in William Hunter’s school. He was by
all accounts an outstanding teacher eventually becoming William Hunters
successor as professor of anatomy at the Royal Academy. He published various
learned works on anatomy including his magnum opus ‘The History of the Absorbent system’ in 1784. This was a good year
for him, he married Rebeca Palmer the daughter of the vicar of Combe Raleigh in
Devon and also took part in the second manned balloon flight in England when he
accompanied the French aeronaut Jean Pierre Blanchard from Chelsea to Sunbury
The flight, which unsurprisingly was the object of great public interest, did
not go smoothly. According to the Gentleman’s Magazine, “the fields for a
considerable distance round little Chelsea were crowded with horse and foot, in
consequence of which a general devastation took place in the gardens, the
produce being either trampled down or torn up. The turnips grown there were
totally despoiled. At 12 o’clock M Blanchard and Dr Sheldon stepped into the
boat pending from the balloon, and the cords being loosed, it took a diagonal
direction across the garden, its altitude being about two feet off the ground,
and then rose above the wall, but not high enough for the boat to clear it.”
Blanchard tried to persuade Sheldon to leave the balloon in order to lighten
the load but Sheldon, who was paying for the trip, refused. A piqued Blanchard
reacted by throwing Sheldon’s scientific instruments overboard and the balloon
finally took off. The two men had a violent quarrel as they floated over South
west London and into Surrey and when the balloon came down at Sunbury Sheldon
departed leaving Blanchard to fly on alone to Romsey, 73 miles from their
starting point in Chelsea.
As
well as ballooning Sheldon was also interested in the anatomy of whales. After
devising a poisoned harpoon to help him secure specimens he set out on a voyage
to Greenland in 1788. At sea he had some sort of breakdown, an attack of ‘brain
fever’ as his contemporaries put it and was transferred to another vessel
making the return voyage to England. From that point on he suffered a recurring
madness, probably a bi-polar disorder, that made it impossible for him to work
regularly for the next ten years. Following a petition from his brother the Queen
gave him permission to continue to give an annual lecture at the Royal Academy
and he published a couple of essays, one on the patella and the other on the
iris, but otherwise he was out of work for a decade. He moved to Combe Raleigh
where his wife’s father was vicar and lived quietly until 1797 when he had
recovered sufficiently to be appointed surgeon to the Royal Devon and Exeter
hospital. He died in October 1808 and was buried in his father-in-law’s
churchyard. A couple of months later his
long suffering wife Rebecca presented his prize anatomical specimen to the
Hunterian, the naked, embalmed body of a 24 year old woman which Sheldon
apparently had kept on prominent display in his bedchamber for over thirty years.
The
French Geologist and traveller Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond (left), shared
Sheldon’s passion for ballooning and had met
him on a trip to England and Scotland in 1772. In 1797 he published his ‘Voyage
en Angleterre, en Écosse et aux Îles Hébrides’ which contained a detailed
account of their meeting at Sheldon’s London home. He had, Saint-Fond noted,
“one of the finest anatomical cabinets in existence.” His host had ‘none of
that English gravity,’ about him the Frenchman noted approvingly, instead he
had an “extraordinary passion for study…..unceasingly animated by the vivacity
or fervour of his character.” The two men discussed ballooning – at this point
Sheldon had yet to make his ascent with Blanchard and had limited his
experiments in aeronautics to building a balloon of varnished linen, 56 feet in
diameter, in Lord Foley’s garden. As for Sheldon’s cabinet of curiosities, this
was so interesting that Saint-Fond dedicated several mornings to studying its contents.
The object that fascinated him the most though was ‘a kind of mummy which was
very remarkable……It occupied a distinguished place in the chamber where the
anatomist usually slept; and he was particularly fond of this work.” He goes on
to describe how he was introduced into a “very handsome bed-room” where an
oblong mahogany table occupied the middle of the floor facing the bed. The top
of the table slid open to reveal a glass topped display case containing “the
body of a young woman of nineteen or twenty, entirely naked. She had fine brown
hair, and lay extended as on a bed.” Sheldon opened the display case and
encouraged Saint-Fond to handle the embalmed corpse. He admired “the
flexibility of the arms” and “a kind of elasticity in the bosom” and the
perfect preservation of the “other parts” of the body. Saint-Fond did notice, and commented to his
host, that the fleshy parts appeared rather dry and the muscles too tense.
Sheldon tetchily explained that this was the result of the long sickness which
had killed the young woman rather than his embalming technique which he went to
explain in great detail to the fascinated Frenchman. As Sheldon was closing up his display case
Saint-Fond asked who this young woman was to which Sheldon replied “frankly and
without any hesitation ‘It is a mistress whom I tenderly loved. I paid every
attention to her during a long sickness and a short time before her death she
requested that I should make a mummy of her body and keep her beside me. I have
kept my word to her.” Worldly as he was, Saint-Fond was shocked “I could not
escape a disagreeable feeling at seeing a lover coolly describe the anatomical
operations which he had made on the object of his most tender affection, on a
most charming young woman whom he had lost.”
Who could, with his own hands, “perform the disgusting operations which
must be necessary to preserve the body of his friend?” he asks. “I avow I
should almost be tempted to act like the Egyptians, who stoned those who
executed this melancholy business.” Later though he discovered that many “well
informed persons in London” were aware of Sheldon’s story and assured him that
it required great strength of mind for Sheldon to overcome his sensitivity and
carry out the work necessary to preserve Ms Johnson. “I certainly deceived
myself and was wrong in regarding this kind of courage on his part as an act of
cynicism,” Saint Fond observes sadly before moving onto a livelier subject, a
dinner given in his honour at the Royal Academy.
So
who was Miss Johnson? Do we know anything about her? William Sweeting, a nephew
of John Sheldon’s, told various people, including William Clift curator of the
Hunterian that his uncle’s lover had been Sarah Stone a medical artist. At
first glance it seems an unimpeachable source, a close relative but Sweeting
admitted that his aunt knew nothing of Miss Johnson’s true identity and so he
must have had Sarah Stone’s name directly from Sheldon. There cannot have been
many female professional artists working in the 1770’s and so I assumed it
would be easy to track down Sarah Stone, and indeed it was not hard to find
her. Born 1760 Sarah Stone was a painter and illustrator of natural history
subjects most renowned for her paintings of the artefacts and specimens
gathered during Captain Cook’s south sea voyages commissioned by Sir Joseph
Banks. The only problem with the theory is that Sarah Stone was alive and
professionally active until the 1840’s (long after Sheldon himself died) which
makes it impossible for her to be the “most charming young woman” kept embalmed
and naked in Sheldon’s bedroom. Was there another Sarah Stone working as an
artist at the time? It seems unlikely and I certainly can’t trace one.
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