Dean Mahomed, Restaurateur and Shampooing Surgeon

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

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Speaker 2: This is the second part of a two parter on Dean Mohammad, who was born in Putna in northeastern India in seventeen fifty nine and was a camp follower and then a soldier in the British East India Company's Bengal Army. Where we left off in this whole story, Captain Godfrey Evan Baker, who was basically Mohammad's patron, had been accused of extortion and had resigned from the military, and then Muhammad followed his example and together the two men sailed to Cork aboard the Danish vessel Christiansborg in January of seventeen eighty four. Dean Mohammed was by far not the only Indian person who went to what's now UK during the late eighteenth century, but this was something authorities were actively trying to discourage. Officers often wanted to bring an Indian servant with them on their voyage when returning home from India, but officials in London were worried that this could create a community of impoverished Indian immigrants in major port cities. So the East India Company was required to provide return passage for Indian servants, and white officers were required to pay a bond of fifty pounds to ensure that their servant would return to India. Baker and Mohammad's return aboard a Danish ship raises some questions about whether this happened. In Mohammed's case, the British East India Company had informed the Danish East India Company of this requirement, and in theory, the Danish company collected this bond when officers from Britain or Ireland returned on one of their ships.

00:01:56
Speaker 1: It is clear though that they did not.

00:01:59
Speaker 2: Actually feel obligated to do this. It could be kind of relax whether it was enforced. Baker and Mohammad also boarded this ship outside of Kolkata proper, apparently because the Christiansborg was also carrying some kind of secret cargo, so it was loaded outside the city. A lot of kloak and dagger stuff going on with this ship. Seems like maybe there is a smuggling situation.

00:02:22
Speaker 1: Not sure. Yeah, the Christiansborg arrived in Cork in late seventeen eighty four, when Mohammed was about twenty five and Baker was about thirty three. Baker was from a Protestant Anglo Irish family that is, of English descent but born in Ireland, part of a class that's known as the Protestant Ascendancy. He seems to have quickly found a place for himself within Cork's more elite Protestant society, marrying the daughter of a wealthy baron.

00:02:50
Speaker 2: This means that Mohammed was basically moving from one colonized place to another, moving from India, which was in the process of being colonized through the efforts of the British East India Company, to Ireland, in which a Protestant English ruling elite was governing a predominantly Catholic Irish population. Although he was not the only Indian person living in Cork, he was also something of an outsider there, even within that sort of Indian immigrant community. Cork was a port city, so most of its Indian population were sailors or servants who had been working on ships. Others were the wives or girlfriends of white sailors or soldiers who had brought them to Cork from India, but Mohammed had been an officer in the Bengal Army and had reached the second highest rank that it was possible for an Indian to attain. He was also closely connected to a white officer, albeit one whose record was maybe a little spotty. But Mohammed was seen as having a higher social rank than say, a soldier looking for work on a departing ship. But he was also lower in rank than Indian dignitaries and officials who arrived from Southeast Asia for business or personal or educational reasons. He also wasn't really seen as equal to the Anglo Irish community that he was connected to. Through this relationship with Baker, Mohammed seems to have been regarded as something of a curiosity in Cork, not really part of the Anglo Irish society that Baker was part of, but not entirely outside of it either. Mohammed would have already spoken English through his time in the Bengal Army. That was one of many contexts in which an Indian person might learn English in the eighteenth century, but it's clear from his writing and the literary references in that writing that he made a serious study of the language and of material written in it. He again seems to have worked in Baker's household as a valet or a butler, a higher position than a regular servant, but not Baker's equal. Godfrey Evan Baker died in seventeen eighty seven, and that same year Dean Mohammad eloped with a young woman named Jane Dally, who was described as a student and a member of the Protestant gentry. We are not sure exactly how old she was. Her gravestone and some obituaries give a birth year of seventeen eighty That does not line up with a marriage six years later. She was definitely not a young child when they got married. It does seem like she was young, though possibly in her like mid to late teens. The couple also paid a bond to the Anglican efficient who conducted the wedding ceremony, rather than going through the usual process of posting the bands ahead of the ceremony and having them read from the pulpit. It is possible that they paid a bond rather than posting the bands because they were trying to avoid controversy around their respective ages or Mohammed's ethnicity. Marriages between white people and people of color weren't unheard of in Britain and Ireland at this points, especially in major cities that had established immigrant communities, but most of the time these marriages happened between servants or working class people, not with members of the gentry. It's also possible that this was something that the efficient demanded. This bond when people paid it protected the Efficient in case it turned out that the marriage was actually illegal in some way, such as if a Protestant were marrying a Catholic, which was outlawed. So Mohammad was definitely not Catholic. He did convert to Anglicanism, he probably converted before this marriage took place, but it's possible that this efficient still kind of looked at him and regarded him as not Protestant. One last question mark about the marriage between Dean Mohammad and Jane Day. It's possible, but not totally certain, that something happened to Jane and that he later remarried to someone else who was also named Jane. Or it is possible that there was just one Jane and that she and Mohammad were married for the rest of their lives. There doesn't seem to be clear documentation to clarify whether there was one Jane or two, but it is confusing in the historical record. Yeah, and I read some more modern write ups that definitively said his first wife died and he remarried someone also named Jane, and others that just proceed as though there is only one Jane without getting into it at all. In seventeen ninety three, Muhammad started placing advertisements for his forthcoming book, looking for subscribers to help cover the cost of publication. This was a common way for people to get their books into print. He also seems to have visited a number of prominent people in person to ask them to subscribe. Ultimately, he got three hundred and twenty subscribers. A lot of them were gentlemen, members of the nobility, other affluent and prominent people.

00:07:55
Speaker 1: They weren't all men.

00:07:56
Speaker 2: There were a lot of like high ranking women among the subscribers. It seems to have been very well connected among the more elite people.

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Speaker 1: Four hundred and fifty copies of his book, The Travels of Dean Mohammad, a native of Patna in Bengal, through several parts of India. While in the service of the Honorable the East India Company, written by himself in a series of Letters to a friend in two volumes, was published on January fifteenth, seventeen ninety four. The book was dedicated to William A. Bailey, Esquire Colonel in the service of the Honorable the East India Company. This dedication may explain why the book describes one of Bailey's defeats as a victory. As we noted in Part one, this was written specifically for an English speaking audience, people from Britain or Ireland who might have reason to visit India. So epistolary travel narratives and epistolary novels were a really popular genre in eighteenth century Britain, and Mohammad wrote this as a series of thirty eight letters to a fictional addressing these letters only as dear sir. And it's really obvious from his writing that he had studied other travel narratives as well as other English language literary styles and conventions. This was written so skillfully that he had some detractors who claimed it was impossible for an Indian to have written such an English work. Again, there were a lot of ways.

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Speaker 2: That people in India like Indian people in India were learning English. This is not actually unusual to speak English, but people were like, there's no way that an Indian wrote this. It sounds way to English.

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Speaker 1: He assumes that his reader is educated and knowledgeable, and subtly reinforces the idea that he is educated and knowledgeable as well, including leaving Latin quotes in Latin untranslated, with the implicit assumption that both he and his readers know what those quotes say. He also includes terms from multiple other languages, including Hindi, Persian, Bengali, and local dialects from different parts of India. At other points, he used terminology that would be accessible and understandable to his audience rather than local terms that would have been more accurate. For example, he describes a number of Muslim practices around birth and circumcision as baptism. No actual baptism was involved, but he was trying to make what he was describing more relatable and understandable to the people who would read it. Muhammad meant this also as an account of his own life in India, including his time with the Bengal Army, and as a travel guide for people who might want to visit or work in India, whether this was in a military or a civilian role. So he included extensive descriptions of the Indian subcontinent's cities and landscapes, its plants and animals, including elephants, rhinoceroses, and camels, and its cultures and religions, primarily in terms of Muslims and Hindus. He also included a glossary, and he printed this work as two small volumes so that it would be more easily portable. We're going to talk about the book in more detail after we paused for a sponsor break.

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Speaker 2: Dean Mohammet's Travels of Dean Mahammet was not the first English language book written by a traveler from somewhere outside of Europe, was the first one by an Indian person in English. We do know that this is unique though, in terms of Muhammad's role in his place in both Indian and Anglo Irish society. This is a work about the peoples and the cultures of India written by an Indian for an English speaking white audience.

00:11:47
Speaker 1: Overall, it is far more.

00:11:49
Speaker 2: Sympathetic to its Indian subjects than similar work by white writers generally was in the eighteenth century, although it does still describe tribal peoples who were living outside of the more mainstream Indian society as savages. This book could be kind of romanticized, but it was not really sensationalized in the way that most white writers work on India was. At the same time, broadly speaking, it was supportive of the British East India Company's endeavors in India. Again, it was specifically written for people who were likely to see those endeavors as a good and necessary thing, but he could also be critical both of the company's more extreme efforts to control the Indian population and of the decline in the power of the Mughal Empire that the British had both taken advantage of and contributed to. So you can read this book as an attempt to give an English speaking European audience a more accurate idea of what India and its peoples were like, or you can read it as complicit with British efforts to colonize and control India, or both. As an example of what this book is like, he wrote this description of Bnaris, also called Varanasi as an example of sort of the glories of India's past. Quote, there was once a very fine observatory here, and a few years ago some European gentlemen, led hither by the love of science and antiquity, discovered a great many astronomical instruments of a large size, admirably well contrived, though injured by the hand of time. It was supposed they might have been constructed some centuries ago under the direction of the Great Okper, the fond votary of science, and the distinguished patron of the Brahmins, who applied with unwearied assiduity to the study of astronomy. So Akpa was the third Mughal emperor. I've had him on my list for an episode forever. I've maybe may yeah. I feel like a lot of what I have about him is written from a more Muslim perspective and not as much detail about like how did the Hindus that he was ruling over feel about Olivis. Muhammad described the decline of the Mughal Empire this way. Quote the history of the revolutions of his court is fraught with so much fiction that it would be impossible to reconcile it to reason or reflection. Yet, if we believe the records and traditions of the natives. Its sovereigns were the greatest and most arbitrary monarchs in the world. Their orders, though ever so extravagant, were submissively obeyed, and their mandates observed by the remotest nations. Their very name struck terror into the hearts of their enemies. But so rapid has been the decline of their power that the race of the great Tamerlane is now little respected. Since the days of Nazam al Mulud, the royal tenure of the throne is grown so insecure that the Mogul has been of late years deposed at pleasure to make way for such of his servants as could gain over the people that great engine of power to their cause. His authority, which prevailed in former ages over most of the kings of Earth, now reaches little farther than his saraglio, where he dreams away life, drowned in the enjoyment of dissolute pleasures. Muhammad also described India in a lot of passages in terms of like the India of the present day as truly beautiful. As one example quote, the country around Banaras is considered as the paradise of India, remarkable for its lubrious air, fascinating landscapes, and innocence of its inhabitants to simple manners, and had a happy influence on all who lived near them. While wasteful war spread her horrors over other parts of India, this blissful country often escaped her ravages, perhaps secured by its distance from the ocean, or more probably by the sacred character ascribed to the scene, which had, through many ages been considered as the repository of the religion and learning of the Brahmin and the prevailing idea of the simplicity of the native Hindus, a people unaccustomed to the sanguinary measures of what they term civilized nations. Several of the letters in the book are devoted to different aspects of culture and religion, with more detail in terms of Muslim beliefs and practices. Since Mohammed didn't have as much familiarity with the practices of Hinduism or other religions. When English language writing on India was full of descriptions of its people as savage, backward, and alien, Mohammed wrote this description of Muslims quote, the Mohammedans are in general, of very healthful people, refraining from the use of strong liquors and accustomed to a temperate diet, they have but few diseases for which their own experience commonly finds some simple, yet effectual remedy. When they are visited by sickness, they bear it with much composure of mind, partly through an expectation of removing their disorder by their own manner of treating it. But when they perceive their grows too violent to submit even to the utmost exertions of their skill, they send for Amolna, who comes to the bedside of the sick person, and, putting his hand over him, feels that part of his body most affected, and repeats with a degree of fervency, some pious prayers, by the efficacy of which it is supposed the patient will speedily recover. The Mahometans meet death with uncommon resignation and fortitude, considering it only as the means of enlarging them from a state of mortal captivity and opening to them a free and glorious passage to the mansions of bliss. Those ideas console them on the bed of sickness, and, even amid the pangs of dissolution. The parting soul, struggling to leave its earthly prison and panting for the joys of immortality, changes at bright intervals, the terrors of the grim monarch into the smiles of a cherub who invites it to a happier region. He also tried to dispelse some misconceptions that he thought his readers probably had about Islam as a religion. For example, quote the Mohammedans are strict adherence to the tenets of their religion, which does not, by any means consist in that enthusiastic generation for Mohammad, so generally conceived, it considers much more as its primary object the unity of the Supreme Being under the name of Allah. Mohammed is only regarded in a secondary point of view as the missionary of that unity, merely for destroying the idle worship to which Arabia had continued so long under bondage, and so far from addressing him as a deity, that in their orations they do not pray to him but for him, recommending him to the divine mercy. It is a mistake in though generally received opinion that pilgrimages were made to his tomb, which in a religious sense were only directed to what is called the Kahaba or Holy House at Mecca, an idle temple dedicated by him to the unity of God. His tomb is at Medina, visited by the Maham's purely out of curiosity and reverence to his memory. As we mentioned before the break, this book also included a glossary. Here are some examples. Bang and intoxicating juice of a vegetable bizarre a market beetle, a leaf growing on a vine and chewed by all ranks of people, brahmin a priest, daggas custom house officers or collectors, duly a woman's chair like a sedan, hackeries, carts or coaches drawn by oxen, paddy grounds, rice fields, pagoda an Indian temple. Raja the highest title claimed by the Gentoo princes. He defined Gentoo as a native Indian in a state of adulatry. Seepois Indian foot soldiers hired and disciplined by Europeans. Zemindary an officer who takes care of the rents arising from the public lands. I like how some of the words that needed to be defined in the eighteenth century are words that are just commonly used in English now, like bizarre and pagoda. There were also poems. Some of the poems weren't attributed to anyone, they were presumably written by him. Others were quotes from writers like John Milton. It's clear that Mohammed was influenced by European writing about India, especially John Henry Gross's Voyage to the East Indies published in seventeen sixty six, and Jemima Kindersley's Letters from the Islands of Tenerif, Brazil, The Cape of Good Hope and the East Indies that came out in seventeen seventy seven. In fact, according to Michael H. Fisher, who has written a number of works on Dean Muhammad, about seven percent of this text comes from Gross's book, but rewritten in Mohammed's voice and sometimes reframed to create a more neutral or positive view of the people and places that are being described. For example, Gross included a passage on the practice of chewing beatle leaf, describing it as a vicious habit and saying people did it to fortify the stomach or preserve the teeth, but dismissing the idea that it could do either thing. A very similar passage is in Mohammed's book, but it doesn't dismiss the idea that chewing beetle could fortify the stomach or preserve the teeth, and it presents the chewing of beatle leaf as a luxury for great men, not as a vicious habit. So, as we've talked about before on the show, attitudes about plagiarism were really different in the eighteenth century than they are today. At that time, people were sort of picking up and copying from one another all the time without a lot of furor over it. It's likely that Muhammad used some of this borrowing to kind of fill in gaps in his own knowledge. Since he was Muslim, he could not speak from experience about Hindu beliefs and practices. He also couldn't really talk in detail about the cultures and the practices of people who were living in areas really far away from where he had grown up. There there's enormous cultural diversity in the Indian subco and he was talking about the other side of the region like he might not actually know much detail. At some points, though, like this description of the chewing of beatle leaf, he borrows descriptions of things that he probably.

00:22:13
Speaker 1: Would have known about. We don't totally know why he chose to go with those passages and not ones of his own. Beyond that, this book seems to line up really well with East India Company records on where Mohammed's units would have been during his fifteen years connected to it. This is incredible considering that that meant he was writing about things that had happened between ten and twenty five years before. And there's no evidence that he kept detailed notes during his time in the army. So he's kind of the exception that proves the rule of memory being pretty faulty. Yeah, yeah, And I don't maybe there were notes though, or maybe he did a lot of research going through old newspaper I don't know. He seems to have done pretty good job though, of keeping the timeline correct. I will talk about his life after this book came out. After another quick sponsor break in seventeen ninety six, Godfrey Evan Baker's younger brother, Captain William Massey Baker, bought an estate outside of Cork. William Baker had a daughter named Eleanor whose mother was Indian, and it's possible that Dean Mohammad set up a household somewhere on that estate. He definitely spent time there. On December seventh, seventeen ninety nine, an Indian visitor to Cork named Abu Talib Khan visited while traveling to London to reconnect with an old patron. He wrote an account of his travels which was in Persian and that included writing about this meeting with Dean Mohammed at this estate. In eighteen oh seven, after a little more than twenty years in Cork, Mohammad and his family moved to the fashionable neighborhood of Portman Square in London. At this point he had at least one son, William, born in seventeen ninety seven. He and Jane went on to have several other children, Emilia in eighteen oh eight, Henry in eighteen ten, Dean in eighteen twelve, Rosanna in eighteen fifteen, Horatio in eighteen sixteen, Frederick in eighteen eighteen, and Arthur Eckber in eighteen nineteen.

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Speaker 2: Their living in Portman Square suggests that while they might not have been fully accepted into British society, they weren't entirely excluded from it either. As we said, this is a really fashionable neighborhood. They also must have been making a pretty comfortable living to be having a lodging there. Muhammad started working for a Scottish nobleman named Basil Cochrane, who had returned from India very wealthy, so wealthy that he repeatedly faced accusations of embezzlement. At this point, so called exotic treatments from the East had become a fad in England, drawing inspiration from both Southeast Asia and Egypt. Both of these places were being occupied or colonized by England and France, and so people were kind of bringing things inspired from those places back to Britain, Ireland's continental Europe. Cochrane tried to find a business niche that could capitalize on this fad, and he established a steam bath. Muhammad got a job. They're doing shampooing. This was not washing people's scalps and hair. It was a style of Indian therapeutic massage, with the term shampooing coming from the word chumpy. In eighteen ten, Muhammed established the Hindustani Coffee House in Portman Square. This was more of a restaurant than a coffee shop. He served meat and vegetable dishes with seasoned rice in what sounds like almost a British and Indian culinary fusion. The restaurant's decor was inspired by Indian fashion and art, or possibly by Asian art more broadly. An adjacent room had hookahs for smoking with tobacco blended with herbs from India.

00:26:09
Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: The reason we say Asian art more broadly possibly is that, like one observer wrote a description of it that included the word Chinese, and we don't really know if there was Chinese art or if that this person just kind of lumped everything, if they were trying to sound as though they knew about other cultures. Yes, this was the first known Indian restaurant in England and here is an advertisement that ran for it. Quote Hindu Stanny Coffee House, number thirty four George Street, Portman Square, Mohammed East Indian informs the nobility and gentry. He has fitted up the above house neatly and elegantly for the entertainment of Indian gentlemen, where they may enjoy the hookah, the real chimed tobacco and Indian dishes in the highest perfection and allowed by the greatest epicures to be unequal to any curries ever made in England with choice wines in every accommodation, and now up to them for their future patronage and support, and gratefully acknowledges himself indebted for their former favors and trusts. It will merit the highest satisfaction when made known to the public. People seem to have liked the food at this restaurant, but Mohammed struggled to keep it afloat. It wasn't in a good location to have a dedicated regular clientele or to attract lots of attention from visitors and travelers. After about a year, he brought in a partner named John Spencer to try to salvage the operation, but this just did not work out, and in eighteen twelve Mohammed filed for bankruptcy. He wasn't involved in the restaurant after this point, but it does seem like someone else took over the space and ran a restaurant with the same name, possibly for years afterward. Bankruptcy obviously was a huge financial loss for the Mohammed family. They moved into a boarding house. It's possible that Mohammed's eldest son took a job to try to help out. Mohammad also advertised his services as a valet or a butler, and eventually wound up working at another steambath. Eventually the family moved to Brighton, which was growing into a popular resort town with a focus on sea bathing, bathing machines and wellness spas. Mohammed again worked as a valet, then found a job at a bathhouse and started selling his own cosmetics. By eighteen fourteen, he and Jane were both working as bathhouse keepers at the Indian Medicated Vapor Bath, where Mohammed used Cochrane's steambath designs but with more Indian inspired elements. Jane learned to do shampooing as well, and she supervised the women's baths. Seawater was seen as having health benefits, and Mohammed drew in seawater, heated it into steam, and customers bathed in a contraption sort of like a steam room. In December of eighteen fifteen, Muhammad opened a new business called Battery House Baths, in a building that, as its name suggests, had been a battery for the British Border Ordinance Apparently though, all the cannon fire that went on there, combined with ongoing erosion issues kind of weakened the foundation that made it not a great idea to keep firing cannons around there anymore. Within three years, Mohammad was billing himself as a shampooing surgeon. He wasn't performing surgery like we would describe it today. People were using the word surgeon to mean more along the lines of doctor. So he was using steam baths and massage to treat all manner of ailments. And as his success grew, he opened another facility up the cliff from the battery that was known as.

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Speaker 1: The West Cliff Baths. In eighteen twenty, Mohammad printed a book that was basically a collection of customer testimonials for his wellness treatments. This was called Cases Cured by Sheik Dean Mohammed, shampooing surgeon and inventor of the Indian medicated vapor and seawater bath. Sheik was the honorific chic which he had begun using. Also started building Mohammed's baths on King's Road in Brighton along with business partner Thomas Brown. This bathhouse opened when Mohammad was sixty two, and he and his family lived next door. In eighteen twenty two, Mohammad published another book, Shampooing or Benefits Resulting from the Use of the Indian Medicated Vapor Bath, as Introduced into this Country by S. D. Mohammad, native of India, containing a brief but comprehensive view of the effects produced by the use of the warm bath in comparison with steam or vapor bathing. This built on that earlier booklet of testimonials outlining how he used shampooing and vapor baths to treat various ailments. The book started with quote, Shampooing is a process which I feel it incumbent on me to acknowledge, cannot be practiced by any person unaccustomed to it, or who has not frequently witnessed and been instructed carefully in the operation. Several pretenders have since my establishment has been formed, entered the held in opposition to me, who professed to know the art. Yet I am sure their ignorance must appear manifest to the world when it is known friction is applied instead of another and less violent action. In the vapor bathing too. I have my imitators, but the public alone must decide on the merit of the copies by a comparison with the original. The herbs with which my baths are impregnated are brought expressly from India and undergo a certain process known only to myself before they are fit for use.

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Speaker 2: He described using his methods to treat asthma contractions, which were spasms, paralysis, or palsy as in what might follow a stroke, rheumatism, and sprains. Each description was followed by several customer testimonials for how people had recovered. He also gave a brief explanation that he said he did not think all ailments could be cured through his methods, but that he followed that with a number of testimonials that were related to various other complaints. This included hoarseness, knee pains, a spinal complaint, a nervous disorder, abscesses, piles that's hemorrhoids, general weakness. Et said it was a wide range of things covered in these additional testimonials. Listen, he's covering himself by saying not everything is going to be cured, but I'd have cured an awful lot of stuff. And he also included several poems that were written in his honor, like this one from Missus Kent of Wimpole Street, London. Worn out by anguish and excess of pain, hope seemed delusive and assistance vain. Oppressed by sorrow, languid by disease, deprived of health, all pleasure ceased to please the bath whose influence o'er the shattered frame, like the mild soothing of a parent, came bade her. Now hope, who felt afflictions rod and blessed with health, now breathes her thanks to God, to thee Mohammed led a grateful heart its warmest thanks ingratitude. In part by the great skill and unremitting care, one has been saved that might have perished here, who, while she feels a pulse within her veins, will bless thy name if memory remains. There were several of these very flattering poems. I love this whole thing, obviously. There were also newspaper clippings praising his bathouse, a list of subscribers' names, and a brief account of his own biography. This presented him as ten years older than he really was, with that ten additional years spent working at Calcutta hospital before joining the Bengal Army.

00:33:44
Speaker 1: This did not happen.

00:33:47
Speaker 2: It was made up, as with that copied in paraphrased parts of his travel book. Though this is also an incredibly common for people who were working in this sort of pseudo medical wellness spots base the do like making up a medical biography for yourself.

00:34:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, cooking up credentials.

00:34:05
Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm not saying that's a great thing to do. I'm just saying he was not doing anything unusual given the time or the fact that he was working in wellness in Brighton. In eighteen twenty five, Muhammad published a revised version of his book that was more in line with prevailing medical discourse around the ailments he was treating. He also received a warrant of appointment as Royal shampooing surgeon from two consecutive monarchs, Kings George the fourth and William the fourth. Muhammad's bathhouses were incredibly popular. They were described as very fashionable and elegant, and he tried to open new branches in London and to fend off various competitors in the eighteen twenties, but by the late eighteen thirties his popularity was really starting to wane. In the later years of his reign, King William the Fourth kind of moved on to other resorts and other establishments, and a lot of clients just kind of followed where the king went. Although Mohammed extended numerous invitations to William's successor, Queen Victoria, she apparently never visited one of his baths. Mohammed's business in Brighton also suffered as it was disrupted by the construction of various other buildings and sea walls, and also other people just built bathhouses and those were newer and more modern. In eighteen forty one, Mohammed's partner, Thomas Brown died and Mohammed's baths were auctioned off. Even though he seems to have made a very successful living from his business, Mohammed did not have the money to buy these bathhouses himself. He hoped the buyer would hire him and then keep him on for running the baths, but instead the space was leased to one of his competitors. Mohammed tried to keep offering treatments in his home during the last years of his life. Indians in England are being seen less as a curiosity and more as an annoyance. And as racially inferior to White Britain's life.

00:36:00
Speaker 1: This wasn't new.

00:36:01
Speaker 2: This had been the case before, especially among the more less affluent classes of people, but it was just becoming more obvious and more pronounced. Mohammed and his family seem to have fallen from public site in Brighton. Jane died of uterine cancer on December twenty sixth, eighteen fifty and then Dean Muhammad died two months later on February twenty fourth, eighteen fifty one, at the age of ninety one. They were both buried at Saint Nicholas's Parish Church in Brighton. Mohammad had been really well known while living in Cork and then in London, and he had been famous during the heyday of his Brighton baths, but by the time he died, he and his businesses had largely been forgotten. On September twenty ninth, two thousand and five, a historical marker was unveiled in London at the site of the Hindustani Coffeehouse and a Google doodle. On January fifteenth, twenty nineteen, marked the two hundred twenty fifth anniversary of the publication of the travel of Dean Mohammed. As a final note, Dean and Jane Mohammad obviously had a very large family.

00:37:07
Speaker 1: One of their.

00:37:08
Speaker 2: Grandchildren has actually come up on the show before, not that long ago. Frederick Henry Horatio Apera Mohammed lived from eighteen forty nine to eighteen eighty four and worked at Guy's Hospital in London, where he made a number of important discoveries related to blood pressure, hypertension and kidney disease. So of course we talked about him a bit in our hygh pertension episode. Sadly, he died of typhoid at the age of only thirty five. Do you have a little listener mail to cap off Dean Mohammed's story.

00:37:38
Speaker 1: I do, It's really quick. A quick point from Arturo who wrote after our.

00:37:43
Speaker 2: Episode on Lcaricia of Winchester and Arturur wrote, Dear Tracy and Holly, you rightly point out that not all people engaged in money lending were Jews, and not all Jews were engaged in money lending, But I wanted to point out another factor that pushed medieval Jews to banking, finance and trade. Jews in many countries were forbidden from owning land so they could not be farmers or landlords. They were not allowed to join guilds, so many professional trades were foreclosed to them. There were only so many ways to make a living in medieval Europe. Regards are Turo. Thank you for this note, our Turo. I feel like we had made like similar points from a different direction. We had talked about people being allowed to live only in England in London and then other cities, and they're being restrictions on what professions they could pursue, But we hadn't specifically talked about land owning or the fact that having to be a member of a guild cut people off.

00:38:44
Speaker 1: From so many different professions.

00:38:46
Speaker 2: I think, if I am remembering correctly from my research toward the end of when there was a Jewish community in England during the medieval period, there were some people who were allowed to own lands. But don't quote me on that. I could be misremembering, or I could have blurred some things together in what I was doing. So thank you so much our cheer every game giving us a chance to make that distinction.

00:39:15
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