Mary Ann Bevan was born in 1874 and worked as a nurse in London. She married and had four children. Then she began to change. Her hands grew bigger, her face started to elongate, and she developed headaches and poor eyesight. Bevan's appearance caused her to lose her nursing job. Then her husband died suddenly in 1914. Bevan took odd jobs to support her children, but even that became difficult. A farmer who hired her told her, “all [she was] fit for [was] the ugly woman competition.”
We know now that Bevan had acromegaly, a pituitary condition that can strike at any time. All she knew was that she needed to support her family, so she indeed entered an ugly woman competition, and won. The publicity led to a career in sideshows, at Coney Island, and with Ringling Brothers. That may seem strange to us today, because she wasn't really ugly, but at the time people with deformities or disabilities were hidden away at home. Bevan's willingness to show herself made her wealthy enough to send all her kids to college, the equivalent of $1.6 million dollars today. Read the story of Mary Ann Bevan at All That's Interesting.
The story was posted today at reddit, but the "before" picture there is not Bevan. Here is a picture of Bevan before she developed acromegaly.
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