Barnum exhibits Joice Heth as Washington's nurse

AUG 10 1835

From 10 August 1835 at Niblo's Garden in New York, P. T. Barnum exhibited Joice Heth, an enslaved and by then blind and largely paralysed Black woman, advertising her as 161 years old, born in 1674, and George Washington's childhood nurse. She died on 19 February 1836, and Barnum sold tickets to a public autopsy on 25 February attended by around 1,500 people, at which the surgeon David L. Rogers put her age at about 80. Barnum then claimed Rogers had dissected the wrong body and that Heth was alive in Europe, before admitting that too was a stunt.