How old?

Two women in 2 different centuries have claimed to live past the age of 150. The 1st was proven to be a hoax, and the 2nd cannot been authenticated.

Joice Heth (pictured above) was billed by American showman P.T. Barnum as "The greatest national and natural curiosity in the world." She was said to have been born in 1674, had nursed future president George Washington (1732-1799) while a slave, and was on tour in 1835 at the age of 161. Even though she was blind, toothless, nearly paralyzed, and toured with Barnum for only 7 months, Heth springboarded his career after he purchased her for $1,000 from her former promoter R.W. Lindsay. Her act - which consisted of telling stories about "little George," singing hymns, and entertaining questions from the audience - raked in a handsome profit for the showman. She performed for as long as 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, in everything from museums and concert halls to taverns and railway houses across the northeastern United States. Because of doubts raised repeatedly in the press about the authenticity of her age and even her person - some of it stirred up by Barnum himself to reignite interest, Barnum promised a postmortem examination. After Heth died of natural causes on February 19, 1836, Barnum engaged the services of surgeon David L. Rogers to perform an autopsy in New York's City Saloon before an audience of 1,500 - each of whom purchased a ticket for the privilege. When Rogers declared the age claim a fraud (she was probably no older than 80), Barnum insisted there was a case of mistaken identity and that Heth was still alive. Later he admitted the hoax.

Turinah has been discovered recently by census workers in Indonesia, who believe her claims to have been born in 1853, making her 157 years old. She still works around the house, has smoked clove cigarettes all her life, and has an adopted daughter aged 108. "Despite her age she still has an incredible memory, clear sight and has no hearing problems," says statistics bureau official Jhonny Sardjono. Turinah speaks fluent Dutch, a language used during the colonial period which ended in 1945. Although the Indonesian government accepts her age, the Guiness Book of World Records will not consider her claim - which would make her the oldest person who ever lived - because she burned her identification documents to avoid being linked to the attempted Communist takeover of the country in 1965.

Frank Buckland

Frank Buckland (1826-1880) is one of my favorite eccentric Englishmen of the 19th c. He made his living as Inspector of Salmon Fisheries, but it is his incredible curiosity about the natural world that, let us say, sets him apart. The man had many skills, including preparing animal skulls and skins and treating sick porpoises at the zoo, and numerous interests, including touring English ossuaries and examining ancient Egyptian mummies. He conducted many of his own experiments, including evaluating the defleshing work of dermestid beetles, and sealing toads in limestone for one year to assess credibility of stories of live toads being released from newly quarried blocks. I once began an outline for a biography and here are the things Frank did that tickled and/or appalled me most:

• Stole Ben Jonson’s heelbone from his tomb
• Determined the relics of St. Rosalia at Palermo to be goat bones
• Located the remains of John Hunter in a crowded church crypt so they could be reinterred in Westminster Abbey
• Kept a skull found during the digging of a foundation after finding it to be an asylum patient
• Kept a skull thought to be a murder victim after determining it to be a Crimean war trophy
• Led the London Acclimatisation Society in introducing exotic species into England for their meat
• Tasted buffalo, earwig, field mice, giraffe, kangaroo, leopard, mole, ostrich, porpoise, sea slug, snake, whale, zebra
• Owned a pet rat that he allowed on the dining room table
• Raised a bear, buzzard, fish, jaguar, magpie, mice, monkeys, owl, parrots, raccoon, snakes, woodchucks
• Discredited the Fee Jee mermaids exhibited by P.T. Barnum and other showmen
• Observed the mummified body of performer Julia Pastrana (photo below), whom he had seen on stage
• Questioned the safety of corsets
• Put eels in public fountain as a prank

To his discredit, Buckland chain-smoked cigars. To his great credit, he wrote the multi-volume Curiosities of Natural History. Among his acquaintainces he counted Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), the “Original Siamese Twins”; Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873); Austrian anatomist Joseph Hyrtl (1810-1894); and married giants Martin van Buren Bates (1837-1919) and Anna Swan (1846-1888).