Authors: Matthew Goodman
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Joice Heth remained on the Bowery for several more weeks, and then left with Lyman on another tour of Connecticut, making stops in several small towns before arriving in New Haven in January 1836. The rigors of touring may finally have worn her down, or maybe it was her first New England winter and the constant proximity of so many other bodies, but during the exhibition in New Haven she began to feel ill. Joice Heth, the local papers reported, was “ailing from a cold.” Lyman brought her to the home of Barnum’s brother Philo in Bethel, where she was cared for by her private nurse, a “faithful colored woman” Barnum had hired in Boston.
On February 21, 1836, a horse-drawn sleigh pulled up at Barnum’s boardinghouse in New York, and at the door the driver handed him a note from Philo. Aunt Joice, the note said, was no more. She had died peacefully in her bed, and her body was being conveyed to him to dispose of as he deemed proper. It was outside, in the sleigh.
Barnum had Joice Heth’s body carried inside and placed in a small room to which he had the only key. He had already decided that she should be returned to Bethel and interred in the village burial ground there, but that trip would have to wait. The next morning he went to call on a surgeon of his acquaintance. Joice Heth still had one more show to perform.
Dr. David L. Rogers was one of New York’s most eminent physicians. A resident surgeon at New York Hospital, at the age of thirty-six he had been performing surgeries for well over a decade. He had pioneered several surgical techniques that were now in wide use and was also renowned as an expert anatomist, often called upon to conduct autopsies in unusual or challenging cases.
Like so many New Yorkers, Dr. Rogers had attended the Joice Heth exhibition at Niblo’s Garden, and like everyone else he had been fascinated to observe a woman said to have lived for the better part of two centuries.
His, though, was an uncommonly trained eye, and by the time he exited the viewing room he was a skeptic about the longevity of Joice Heth. He noted that her pulse recorded a steady seventy-five beats per minute, while her hearing, voice, intellect, and general bodily functions appeared to be no more impaired than those of persons half as old as she claimed to be.
(Joice Heth’s blindness, Rogers believed, was the result of an eye disease that had likely befallen her many years earlier.) As Barnum recounted the story in his autobiography, Dr. Rogers “expressed a desire to institute a postmortem examination if she should die in this country. I agreed that
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he should have the opportunity, if unfortunately it should occur while she was under my protection.” On the morning of February 22, Barnum went to see Rogers, likely at his medical offices on Chambers Street, and told him that Joice Heth had died. Rogers reiterated his wish to examine her, and by the time Barnum returned home, an autopsy had been scheduled.
Two days later the
Sun
carried the news of the death of Joice Heth.
“She was treated with the utmost attention and care,” the story reported,
“and died with perfect tranquility.” Richard Adams Locke and Dr. David L. Rogers were close friends; it is possible they had first met when Rogers testified about his examination of Robert Matthews—the self-proclaimed Matthias the Prophet—at the trial Locke attended as a reporter. Locke undoubtedly knew of Rogers’ desire to examine Joice Heth, and in the
Sun
report of her death he endorsed the idea of a postmortem, declaring that an opportunity such as this one, to examine the effects of extreme old age on the human body, would not soon come again. Locke did have some qualms about the propriety of such a procedure—“We felt as though the person of poor old Joice Heth should have been sacred from exposure and mutilation,” he acknowledged in a story later that week—but in the end those doubts were outweighed by his abiding faith in the importance of scientific research: “The investigation, conducted by a competent hand, would doubtless form an instructive and valuable record in anatomical science.” Yet even here Richard Adams Locke could not resist taking a swipe at those who would deny slaves their full complement of rights.
“The old woman’s soul, we trust, is quite comfortable in heaven,” he wrote, “where, perhaps, distinctions of color are of less consequence than they are here.”
Perhaps: but in nineteenth-century New York there was no avoiding racial discrimination, even in the care of the dead. Though autopsies had long been considered a critical tool in advancing understanding of the human body, and particularly the effects of age and disease, not many New Yorkers were willing to give up the body of a loved one for dissection. In earlier years the shortage of cadavers had led to some highly unsavory practices, and ultimately, to one of the first of New York’s great riots, the “doctors’ riot” of 1788, when residents of the neighborhood around New York Hospital discovered that medical students had been digging up graves—body snatching—to obtain their specimens. More than five thousand rioters stormed the hospital, destroying its laboratories and reburying every body they could find inside. The medical students at the hospital
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were also taken hostage; the mayor was summoned to the scene, and after obtaining the release of the students, he ordered them placed in jail for their own protection. Soon the mob had surrounded the jail, and the militia defending it fired on the crowd, killing three people and wounding many more. The experience was deeply disturbing to the city in every imaginable way, and grave robbing, which had once been, if not condoned by the medical establishment, at least not actively discouraged, all but ceased. Medical schools had to look elsewhere for their specimens—and by the early decades of the nineteenth century autopsies were primarily reserved for those who, in death as in life, had few to defend them: paupers, criminals, blacks, and especially, like Joice Heth herself, slaves.
It was not unusual for an autopsy to be conducted in front of an audience of interested spectators; indeed, by the 1830s American universities had begun to construct anatomical theaters where medical students could watch autopsies being performed. Still, there had not been anything even remotely resembling the spectacle P. T. Barnum dreamed up for Joice Heth’s autopsy. Barnum had rented out the amphitheater of the City Saloon on Broadway (where one of the other viewing rooms showed Henry Hanington’s peristrephic dioramas) and publicized the event with a generous application of printer’s ink. “ANATOMICAL EXAMINATION,” announced one of his newspaper advertisements, promising an event that would be “particularly interesting as well to the public generally as to the Faculty and Medical Students.” (In his autobiography Barnum indicated that the autopsy was arranged for the day after his visit to Rogers; in fact it took place three days later, on February 25, more than enough time for him to organize the publicity.) By Thursday at noon, when the autopsy was scheduled to begin, the theater was filled with nearly fifteen hundred people, each of whom had paid an admission fee of fifty cents for the privilege of being among the first New Yorkers to discover, at last, the answer to the mystery of Joice Heth.
An excited, anticipatory buzz must have arisen from the crowd when the hour drew near, as before any long-awaited show of which there will be only a single performance, followed by a respectful hush when the mahogany coffin was carried into the hall. Joice Heth’s body was removed and placed on the examination table. Barnum and Levi Lyman strode solemnly to the table, where they were joined by Dr. David L. Rogers. Behind him stood his friend Richard Adams Locke, who had been granted exclusive coverage of the autopsy for the
Sun.
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Dr. Rogers’s surgical case lay open beside the table, revealing an array of instruments, their blades gleaming impressively in the light of the lamps.
Rogers took a moment to explain to the audience that the surest evidence of extreme old age was the ossification—the conversion into bone—of various parts of the body. It was very common to find ossification in the major arteries; in the case of one woman he had examined in Italy, who had died at the age of 115, he had found the heart to be almost entirely ossified.
With that, he took scalpel in hand and made the first incision, slicing across Joice Heth’s abdomen. After some examination he pronounced her abdominal viscera to have, as Locke recorded it for the
Sun,
“a perfectly natural and healthy appearance.” The liver was of proper size, and to all indications unmarked by disease. Exchanging the scalpel for a handsaw, Rogers cut through the sternum and pried apart the ribs. With great deli-cacy he opened the heart—surely some silent prayers were said among those watching from the seats above—only to discover a complete absence of ossification of the valves, and just the slightest trace of it at the arch of the aorta. (Rogers later told Barnum that he had “expected to have spoiled half a dozen knives” on the ossification of the chest.) Upon examining the lungs, he found many tubercles in the left lobe, which he determined to have been the immediate cause of death. Joice Heth had not been suffering from a cold after all; she had tuberculosis.
As Dr. Rogers had surely anticipated, given Joice Heth’s great garrulousness and remarkable memory, he found her brain to be perfectly healthy. At last the doctor set down his knife. Based on numerous observations, he declared, he felt quite confident in his ultimate judgment (as excitedly recounted by Locke in the
Sun
): “Joice Heth could not have been more than
seventy-five,
or, at the utmost,
eighty years of age!
”
Later, when the commotion had died down and the audience had filed out of the amphitheater, P. T. Barnum took Dr. Rogers aside and assured him that he had engaged Joice Heth in good faith, relying on her appearance and the accompanying documents as evidence of the truth of her story. (It was a version of events that he would insist on to the end of his life, as in 1877, when he told an interviewer, “I believed the documents in her possession as much as I believe the declaration of independence.”) Rogers graciously replied that he had no doubt Barnum had been deceived in the matter, because her outward appearance really was that of a much older woman. The encounter might have ended there, with the two men shaking hands and heading home, but Levi Lyman took the moment to
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step forward and suggest to Dr. Rogers that perhaps the medical profession was not able to decide with much precision in cases such as this one.
In his autobiography Barnum claimed that the remark had been meant as a joke (Lyman, he explained somewhat apologetically, “was always ready for a joke, no matter what the cost or at whose expense”), but if it was a joke it was not much of one—and that is certainly not how it was taken by the man at whom it was directed. David Rogers’s height would generously be described as middling, but he carried himself with an erect bearing that, in the words of his obituary writer, “gave great dignity to his whole deportment”; his only reply to Lyman’s remark was to turn stiffly and, with Locke at his side, exit the hall (“I fear,” Barnum wrote later, “in not very good humor”).
The next day, February 26, Richard Adams Locke broke the story of Joice Heth’s true age, providing the
Sun’
s readers an exclusive accounting of the autopsy, from the initial observation of the body to Dr. Rogers’s determination that Joice Heth had lived no more than half the number of years claimed for her. Locke wrote, “There is therefore a moral certainty that her pretensions to the extraordinary longevity of 161 years, all her stories about her suckling George Washington, and about her fondness for the ‘young master George,’ have been taught her, in regular lessons, for the benefit of her exhibitors.” He did not implicate Barnum himself in the deception; instead, he stated that he believed Joice Heth’s current exhibitors “took her, at a high price, upon the warranty of others.” Still, he could not help but note (ever mindful of the money he struggled to earn in journalism) that the exhibitors had probably earned ten thousand dollars as a consequence.
The Joice Heth affair was, concluded Locke, “the most precious humbug of modern times.”
On the morning after Richard Adams Locke’s account of the Joice Heth autopsy, P. T. Barnum unexpectedly showed up at the
Sun
offices on Nassau Street. He did not give a reason for his visit, but he did not often forgo an opportunity to cultivate friendly relationships with the press, and he must have been especially intrigued to talk with the man who had so impressed him—as both exposer and deceiver. Richard Adams Locke was not only the journalist who had finally revealed Joice Heth’s true age, but he was also the one who created the magnificent hoax that thirty years later, in
The Humbugs of the World,
Barnum would hail as “the most stu-
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pendous scientific imposition upon the public that the generation with which we are numbered has known.”
According to the
Sun
article about the visit, Barnum admitted to Locke that he now believed Joice Heth had
not
been the oldest woman in the world, as he had for months proclaimed, and in general “took our exposure of the humbug with perfect good humor.” It is not known what else the two men discussed, but Locke wrote the next day that he had “heard it hinted”
(undoubtedly from Barnum) that Joice Heth’s exhibitors were planning to embalm the body like a mummy and ship it to England in the company of an old black man who would claim to be Joice Heth’s 180-year-old husband, with letters from George Washington as proof. It was all a joke by Barnum, of course, and Locke took it that way. This latest was a fine idea, he wrote, because the audiences of England would certainly be as gullible as those of America—and he further suggested, referring to the Exodus tale of the ten plagues, “if the shrewd Yankee proprietors will only take with them a few phials containing a part of the darkness which covered the land of Egypt, they might successfully travel through all the continents of Europe.”