ABSTRACT
Wax has been used to represent the human body for more purposes than any other medium, from the crafting of saints and demons to necro-erotic fantasies. It has been crafted into funeral effigies since at least 3000 bc. Body parts have traditionally been made of wax for medical and surgical training. Wax shows probably have the longest history of entrepreneurial entertainment, and certainly the longest history of women both making models and running wax businesses. Wax has never known class barriers; it has always been part of high and low culture. During the eighteenth century there were a number of wax touring shows and exhibitions in London, often run by women like Mrs Salmon, Clark and Bullock, who ran businesses with their husbands and continued as widows. They catered for the sort of popular audience that would also be amused by the assortment of grotesque and glamorous wax figures displayed at fairs. The use of wax bodies and body parts for training doctors became the norm from the sixteenth century. Michelangelo and others both studied anatomy and made anatomical waxes. In the seventeenth century the Italian G.C. Zumbo began to paint his models. During the eighteenth century, the surgeons Pinson and Desnoués made anatomical waxes that were so seductively elegant and erotic that they became collectors' items. The due d'Orléans amassed a large collection that was inherited by the School of Medicine in Paris after he was executed in 1793. The skilled surgeon-sculptor, Desnoués, sold his figures in exhibitions, such as that of Rackstrow in Fleet Street.
