A Toothy Life

This is the grave monument for Thomas William Evans (1823-1897), born and raised here in my neighborhood, and who did very well in life by way of dentistry. You may notice that the obilisk is downright huge --well, it's 150 feet tall. Before doing a little reading for this blip, all I knew about him was that he was Napoleon III's dentist, and that after seeing the plans for the grand boulevards of Paris before they were built (1853-1870), he bought up a lot of property where they were going to be and sold them to the city at inflated prices. In the process he became quite rich, and wound up with (I've been told) the tallest grave marker in the United States, a few blocks from his childhood home. Evans was descended from Welsh Quakers.

But now I realize that he had a very interesting life. When the Second Republic fell and mobs were at the palace gates, Evans was the Empress Eugenie's most trusted friend, and he successfully delivered her from Paris to Deauville incognito, where she fled to England and safety. He acted as the direct emissary of the Emperor to President Lincoln during the American Civil War as well. He pioneered the use of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) in dental surgery, as well as other innovations, but the grand finale was to leave almost his entire fortune to the establishment of a School of Dentistry on the site of his boyhood home, which is part of the University of Pennsylvania.

I took several shots of this very familiar object, but chose this particular on to blip because I find the wisp of cloud behind it somehow attractive.

It is being pointed out to me by a certain distinguished blipster that Evans' land speculation was appalling and the size of his tombstone shows him to be a self-agrandizing materialist. I must admit that it speaks quite noisily after spending time in a Quaker burial ground only yesterday. See her blip for the contrast.

Indeed, some of the mushrooms at the Quaker burial ground were taller than the gravestones. My own take on this supersized thing is that because Evans came from obscurity and finished with many royal friends and high stature, he was very keen on proving his achievements to the publlic here, where his modest roots were. Looking at his life as a whole (as far as I know it), I find him hard to despise.