Manchester Mummy

Hannah Beswick (1688 – February 1758), of Birchin Bower, Hollinwood, Oldham, Greater Manchester, was a wealthy woman who had a pathological fear of premature burial.

Various suggestions were made to test for signs of life before burial, ranging from pouring vinegar and pepper into the corpse's mouth to applying red hot pokers to the feet, or even into the rectum.

[3] Writing in 1895, the physician J. C. Ouseley claimed that as many as 2,700 people were buried prematurely each year in England and Wales; J. Stenson Hooker estimated the figure to be closer to 800.

[6] Jessie Dobson, Recorder of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, has said that there appear to be many "inaccuracies and contradictions" in accounts of the events following Beswick's death in 1758.

Many suggest that she left £25,000 (equivalent to about £4 million as of 2023)[7] to White, a pioneer of obstetrics and one of the founders of the Manchester Royal Infirmary,[8] on the condition that her body was kept above ground, and that periodically she was to be checked for signs of life.

It has been suggested that White had been asked to keep Beswick above ground only until it became obvious that she was actually dead, but that he was unable to resist the temptation to add a mummy to his collection of "wet and dry" exhibits, and so made the decision to embalm her.

[11] White had developed a particular interest in anatomy while studying medicine in London and was building up a collection of "curiosities", which by the time of his death included the skeleton of Thomas Higgins, a highwayman and sheep-stealer hanged for burglary, as well as Hannah Beswick's mummy.

[13] The veins and arteries would have been injected with a mixture of turpentine and vermilion, after which the organs would have been removed from the chest and then the abdomen placed in water, to clean them and to reduce their bulk.

The legs and trunks were tightly bound in a strong cloth such as is used for bed ticks [a stiff kind of mattress cover material] and the body, which was that of a little old woman, was in a glass coffin-shaped case.

[24] Bonnie Prince Charlie entered Manchester at the head of his invading army in 1745, causing Beswick some apprehension over the safety of her money, which she therefore decided to bury.