Happy Halloween! 
Veinity Fair is finally back! 
I missed you guys and I hope you’re ready for some more Victorian trivia and peculiar comics! 
Let’s start just where we left off, with topics chosen by a few lucky winners of previous contests and auctions. Today’s comic was inspired by the winner of a local charity auction who took on the role of our early Victorian investigator. 
The famous Scotland Yard was formed in 1829, but the Metropolitan Police was far from organized in its infancy. In the beginning, the MP was merely keeping watch on the streets and investigation procedures were just being formed, relying primarily on the so-called “story model” rather than the meticulous practices we’re used to today. Because of that, even crime scenes were often left unattended, with curious crowds peeking in and collecting ‘souvenirs’, as in the below example:
The Examiner 11.12.1831
THE DISEASED APPETITE FOR HORRORS,
“The landlord upon whose premises a murder is committed, is nowadays a made man. The place becomes a show—the neighbourhood as the scene of a fair, The barn in which Maria Martin was murdered by Corder, was sold in toothpicks: the hedge through which the body of Mr. Weare was dragged, was purchased by the inch. Bishop’s house bids fait to go off in tobacco-stoppers and snuffboxes; and the well will be drained—if one lady has not already finished it at a draught —at the rate of a guinea a quart. (…)”
What did you do for New Year’s Eve? Maybe you spent the night at a fancy dinner party inside a giant concrete Iguanodon, surrounded by prominent scientists? That’s exactly what Richard Owen, a paleontologist famous for coining the word Dinosauria, did on 31 December 1853. The party took place at The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, and the Iguanodon was a part of a larger exhibition of dinosaur models sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under Owen’s scientific direction. The lavish dinner consisted of eight courses and the whole event was reportedly quite boisterous.
If you would also like to become a character in one of the future comics, check out the Anatomist membership level on 
In many cases the rotting teeth couldn’t be saved and had to be extracted, leaving people with rather toothless smiles. Not all was lost though, at least not to those who could afford a nice set of dentures. 
There were a few popular ways to obtain those: buying them from the poor, forcing them out of unfortunate victims (often enslaved people), and using resurrectionists’ services to dig up some teeth from graves or ransack casualties at battlefields. 
Unsurprisingly, a few decades after the introduction of those pills, a study found that their ingredients were questionable. In 1918, the Journal of the American Medical Association found that each pill contained “a little over one-thirtieth of a grain of strychnin” and that it was “possible for any one to purchase enough strychnin in a single box of Wendell’s Ambition Pills to kill an adult.” 
Tests confirmed that the poster paper contained copper arsenite! 
Fortunately, it was enough for the family to throw the paper away to ease their symptoms. 
This might seem impossible, but it’s exactly what physician Augustus Bozzi Granville did. In 1821, in the midst of Victorian Egyptomania, he had a chance to unwrap, dissect, and thoroughly examine an ancient mummy. During the process, he discovered a wax-like substance surrounding the mummy, which he thought to be a mix of beeswax and bitumen used by Egyptian embalmers. In reality, he came across adipocere (commonly known as corpse wax), a product of saponification of fatty tissues. 
Even the most educated ones were divided between the miasmatic theory and the germ theory of disease for decades; and physicians’ advice could be wildly contradictory. 
These products were used for bruises and were based on a recipe that had been around from medieval times! The worms were first boiled in oil and then broken up in a mortar and mixed with wine and other ingredients. Then the mixture was boiled and used in a liquid form on the bruises. 
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