Mary Ann Bevan, a trained English nurse whose life was shattered by a rare pituitary disorder that disfigured her face and body, died on December 26, 1933, just days after her 59th birthday, leaving behind a legacy that continues to raise urgent questions about how society treats people with visible medical conditions.
Born Mary Ann Webster on December 20, 1874, in Plaistow, East London, she grew up as one of eight children in a poor family. By the late 1890s she had completed her nursing training, a profession transformed by Florence Nightingale’s reforms, and by 1900 she was working as a nurse in London. Photographs from that period show an attractive, dark-haired young woman with a full life ahead of her.
In 1903 she married Thomas Bevan, a London greengrocer she had been courting for some time. The couple quickly built a family, and by the early 1910s they had four children. But around 1906, something began to go terribly wrong with Mary Ann’s body, and the cause would not be understood by medicine for decades.
She was suffering from acromegaly, a rare disorder of the pituitary gland, the organ that regulates hormone production in the human body. The condition is caused by excessive secretion of growth hormones. In young patients still growing, the problem is limited in its effects, but once people reach adulthood their growth plates close.
When acromegaly strikes after that point, the overproduction of growth hormone forces the body to start growing again, producing severe deformities and often intense pain.
In more than 95 percent of cases, the underlying cause is a benign tumor growing in the pituitary gland, known as a pituitary adenoma. The disease affects roughly six people out of every 100,000, and it usually begins to appear in middle age. Symptoms typically start with swelling of the feet and hands, then progress to deformities and enlargement of the face and other parts of the body, exactly as happened to Mary Ann Bevan.
Later, joint pain and recurring headaches appear, and the patient’s voice often becomes deeper. Today, treatments exist. Surgery can attempt to remove the tumor from the pituitary gland, but because this requires brain surgery, drugs and radiation therapy are the preferred first-line treatments.
In Mary Ann Bevan’s time, tragically, little was known about the disease and no effective treatment was available.
As is common with pituitary disorders, her hands and feet appeared swollen first, and the physical damage worsened over the years. She appears to have left her nursing job sometime in the late 1900s or early 1910s as her facial features and other parts of her body became more deformed. Thomas Bevan, who was devoted to his wife, apparently did not mind and was happy for her to stay at home if that was what she preferred while dealing with the onset of her condition.
Then came the blow that changed everything. In 1914, Thomas died prematurely, leaving Mary Ann in a desperate position. She now had to support four young children on her own, the youngest still an infant, and the family was not in good financial shape.
By this time, her face had become more gaunt and masculine in appearance, and folds of skin began to hang beneath her eyes. Her appearance made her less and less able to find work as the years passed.
She moved between jobs in the years following her husband’s death, but she struggled constantly to cover her expenses. Finally, in the late 1910s, she decided to try to profit financially from the way the disease had destroyed her body. She entered a contest to find the ugliest woman in the world, announced in a newspaper by Claude Bartram, the European agent for the American circus Barnum and Bailey.
Mary Ann sent a photograph that caught Bartram’s attention. He contacted Bevan and offered her a job with the Barnum and Bailey circus in the United States. She was hesitant at first, but eventually agreed when she was offered 10 pounds sterling a week for a year, plus all travel expenses covered and additional money from sales of any postcards featuring her at the circus.
With that money, she would now be able to provide an education for her children.
The Barnum and Bailey circus was just one of many shows staged across America and other countries in the twentieth century that are considered today to be cruel and entirely politically incorrect. These shows presented individuals considered freak spectacles, usually because of a deformity or because they were victims of a genetic disorder or a particular disease, as in the case of Mary Ann Bevan.
Such shows might include giants and dwarfs suffering from gigantism or dwarfism, conjoined twins, people with albinism, or individuals born without limbs or who were extremely obese. In shows like these, Mary Ann Bevan would perform her acts over the next few years in America. Initially, her work involved a tour in Hampshire, England, but the head of the circus in America soon contacted her to come there.
Accordingly, she set off from Southampton to America in 1920. There she discovered she was in fact now working for the Ringling Brothers circus. The Ringling Brothers circus was first founded in Wisconsin in 1884 by the five Ringling brothers, sons of German immigrants to America, and in 1919, shortly before Bevan arrived in America, the circus merged with Barnum and Bailey.
The combined entity began advertising itself as “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
When she appeared in their show, Bevan was part of a circus famous worldwide in the early twentieth century. She quickly gained wide fame in American sideshows, appearing in several newspapers that described her as “the ugliest woman in the world.” Within a few months, Bevan became one of the show’s stars, and she soon appeared in the pages of Time magazine.
This was compounded by the decision to dress her during the show in men’s clothing or unattractive clothing, in a way that made her look more masculine and highlighted the damage the disease had done to her. Thanks to this fame, the Ringling Brothers circus made more money, and Bevan received a large share of it. By 1923, she was said to have earned around 20,000 pounds sterling during her time in the United States, a sum equivalent today to nearly half a million pounds.
But one cannot help but wonder about the emotional and psychological toll of displaying her as a human oddity in the circus night after night over those years. Mary Ann returned to Europe in 1925 to take part in a show in Paris, but she eventually made the decision to move her children to New York City. Thanks to the money she earned, she was able to send her four children to boarding school and provide them with a relatively comfortable life.
She continued to work periodically in the Dreamland show on Coney Island in Brooklyn. In 1927, Bevan became a patient of Harvey Cushing, a prominent American neurosurgeon and pathologist who pioneered brain surgery in the early twentieth century. Cushing could not offer much treatment to Bevan, but he wrote a strongly worded letter to Time magazine in response to a recently published article about her.
In it, he stated that this poor woman sitting in the Ringling Brothers sideshow between the fat lady and the armless wonder, wearing white lace hats and high shoes, has a story far from laughable. She was formerly a lively and beautiful young woman, but she became the victim of a disease known as acromegaly. As a doctor, I do not like to feel that the press can be dismissive of the tragedies of disease.
Mary Ann Bevan eventually died in 1933. If acromegaly is treated today, it does not significantly affect life expectancy, but in the early twentieth century, patients usually lost 10 to 15 years of their lives. This was the case with Mary Ann Bevan, who died on December 26, 1933, a few days after her fifty-ninth birthday.
Fortunately, her children carried out her last wish and returned her to England for burial. She was buried in Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries in Lewisham, southeast London.
It should be noted that her death may have been accelerated by a significant problem with alcohol addiction in her later years, a problem undoubtedly worsened by her illness and the way she was mocked almost daily for years. Mary Ann Bevan’s story has been retold periodically over the more than eighty years since her death. This is due to the fame she briefly gained in America in the 1920s, and also because her story demonstrates the cruel attitude society took toward people with physical deformities until the 1920s.
Sometimes Bevan reappears in popular culture in cruder ways. In the early 2000s, the major greeting card and stationery company Hallmark began selling a birthday card mocking the ugliest woman in the world. The card contained an image of Mary Ann Bevan and referred to a dating show at the time in which contestants had to choose among three competitors they could not see.
The idea was that the contestant would choose door number three, behind which stood Mary Ann Bevan.
This birthday card was spotted being sold in London in 2006 by Dr. Wouter Duyra, a Dutch endocrinologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Duyra was visiting the United Kingdom for work and had recently written a scientific paper discussing Bevan’s life and her suffering with acromegaly.
He was dismayed by the card and complained to Hallmark, saying: “Simply, I do not think it is right in 2006 to use her image to create a sick birthday card.”
“I feel this card is insulting to all patients who suffer from the same condition,” he added. Hallmark reluctantly accepted that what it had done by making a sick woman into material for mockery was wrong, but it only stopped future production and refused to withdraw cards already produced from circulation. Robert Knutson, chief executive of the Pituitary Network Association, a group focused on supporting people with pituitary diseases such as acromegaly, later commented that making money from the misery and misfortune of others is shameful.
This is corporate greed at its lowest.
And so Mary Ann Bevan was a woman who, despite all the difficulties she faced, managed to make the most of her situation, even if it was at her own expense. She earned money and gave her children a brighter future and more opportunities than she herself had received in her youth. Her story remains a stark reminder of the human cost of spectacle, and of a medical condition that medicine has since learned to treat but society has been slower to understand.