His name was Joseph Merrick.
He was talented, intelligent, but he also had a debilitating disease that earned him
the cruel nickname "Elephant Man."
Also, he kinda got the "Elephant Man" nickname from his mother.
Here's Joseph Merrick's sad story.
Born on August 5, 1862, in Leicester, England, Joseph Carey Merrick was the spitting image
of health as a baby.
Shortly before he turned 2 however, abnormalities began to appear.
The formerly flawless baby now had a bony growth forming on his forehead, a tumor protruding
from his upper lip, and discolored, lumpy skin.
Unfortunately it was only the beginning.
The limbs on Merrick's right side became disproportionately large, far outgrowing his left arm and leg.
He couldn't stand upright because of how curved his spine was, and to make matters worse,
a childhood hip injury rendered him permanently lame.
Over time, he also developed foul-smelling warts.
Measurements taken when Merrick was in his early 20s showed that one of the fingers had
a 5-inch circumference, while his right wrist measured in at a 12-inch circumference.
His head measured 3 feet around and was so heavy that his body couldn't accommodate it.
In 1890, Merrick died when he decided to lie down to sleep, as opposed to his usual position
of leaning forward with his head on his knees.
"That's how he sleeps.
If he lies down, he'll kill himself."
Sources differ on the exact cause, but the weight of his cranium either suffocated him
or dislocated his neck.
According to authors Jeanette Sitton & Mae Siu-Wai Stroshane, Joseph Merrick spent his
life believing that an elephant caused his condition.
The thought brought him comfort, and was inherited from his mother, Mary Jane Merrick.
She subscribed to an idea that the authors referred to as "maternal impression," which
held that
"...misfortunes during pregnancy could leave their mark on the unborn child."
When was six months pregnant with Joseph, she reportedly got knocked down in front of
a passing circus elephant, with some accounts saying the elephant itself knocked her down.
So when she saw a trunk-like growth on young Joseph's lip and grayish skin develop, the
story goes that she blamed the elephant.
With advances in medicine came new, more credible theories about the origins of Merrick's condition.
In the 1980s, researchers thought they pinpointed the culprit, dubbing a condition called neurofibromatosis
Type 1 as the "Elephant Man's disease," a moniker that continued to stick well into
the 2000s.
But it's been pointed out that the ailment also causes skin spots and epileptic seizures,
neither of which were symptoms Merrick had.
DNA tests conducted on Merrick's bones in the 2000s suggest he actually may have suffered
from Proteus syndrome, but since the bones had previously been cleaned with bleach multiple
times during the preservation process, the DNA wasn't able to give a definitive finding.
In 1873, when Joseph was 10 years old, he lost the only kind parent he had when his
mother passed away from bronchial pneumonia.
In an 1884 autobiography, Merrick called his mother's death
"the greatest misfortune of [his] life."
To Joseph's dismay, his father remarried, taking the landlady as his wife.
So hurtful were his stepmother's insults and open contempt that even though Merrick was
physically incapable of running, he ran away from home as best he could on multiple occasions.
He also walked away from school around age 12 and started working.
At his father's urging, Joseph tried to sell goods door-to-door, but his deformity frightened
potential customers, who sometimes refused to even come out and greet him.
Making matters worse, the lack of money he brought in caused his father to beat him.
Desperate to escape the abuse, Joseph ran away for good.
"You do not own this man, now stop it!"
"I want him back."
"So you can beat him?
So you can starve him?
A dog in the streets would fare better with you."
Merrick attempted to make a living as a salesman, but crowds surrounded him wherever he went.
Unable to make a living, he decided to live at the Leicester Union workhouse instead.
He lived with criminals and alcoholics, and his entire day was tightly controlled.
Meanwhile a mass on Merrick's jaw grew to 8 inches long, hindering his ability to eat,
so he had surgery to have some of the flesh removed.
Finding gainful employment was hopeless for Merrick, because employers couldn't look past
his deformity.
Eventually a kind of Stockholm syndrome set in, and he embraced his disease as a means
for survival, writing
"So thought I, I'll get my living by being exhibited around the country."
And so he became a sideshow attraction, advertised by managers as "Half-a-Man and Half-an-Elephant."
"The Terrible Elephant Man."
Unfortunately for Merrick, he couldn't attract people for very long.
The oddity business had been dying out in the U.K for decades.
By 1885, police had closed his exhibit.
Merrick took his sideshow on the road, touring Europe, but calamity befell him again when
his road manager stole Merrick's life savings and abandoned him in Belgium.
All the while his health continued to deteriorate.
Merrick somehow scraped by and returned to London in 1886.
Fans of David Lynch's 1980 classic movie The Elephant Man no doubt remember the heart-wrenching
scene in which Joseph Merrick's character gets surrounded and hounded by onlookers at
Liverpool Street Station.
Trapped in a sea of inhumanity, he unleashes a pained howl before yelling,
"I am not an animal!
I am a human being!"
According to the Guardian, that scene was true to the memoirs of Frederick Treves, a
surgeon who befriended Merrick in 1884 when the newly dubbed "Elephant Man" brought his
sideshow act to a Whitechapel shop across from the London Hospital.
He attracted ample attention from medical professionals, among them Treves, who placed
Merrick on display at the Pathological Society of London.
But after just one meeting Merrick refused to ever go back.
Despite being stared at for a living, he felt "like an animal in a cattle market" in front
of all those physicians.
Years later, Merrick had just returned from being robbed and abandoned in Belgium.
He couldn't speak, but he had Treves' business card because the doctor examined him back
in 1884.
Treves decided the best course of action was to have Merrick stay at the London Hospital,
but the facility originally refused to open its doors to him because it lacked the means
to treat what they called "incurables."
Thankfully, hospital committee chairman William Carr stepped in, publishing a letter in the
Times newspaper explaining Merrick's situation, and finally, human kindness won out.
Carr's letter elicited an outpouring of support and, more importantly, donations.
Merrick lived out the remainder of his life at the hospital.
"This is my home?"
Prominent figures, including the princess of Wales, saw to it that he got to live out
his dreams of seeing a theater show and vacationing in the country.
Considering his physical condition, and the cruel manner in which contemporary society
responded to it, Joseph Merrick probably didn't have many merry Christmases.
But around the holidays during his stay at the London Hospital, he did still get to experience
the feelings of good will and well wishes that so often eluded him throughout his life.
As recounted in Michael Howell and Peter Ford's biography The True History of the Elephant
Man, Merrick was known to receive Christmas cards during the holidays from far-flung correspondents,
most notably from Princess Alexandra of Wales, who met Merrick in person in 1887 after learning
about his plight.
He also received various unsolicited presents from strangers.
But perhaps the most significant and symbolic gift he ever received was one he made the
effort to specifically ask for himself.
According to the biography, the hospital had gotten donations specifically earmarked for
Merrick, so Dr. Frederick Treves asked what he wanted.
Joseph reportedly replied with some quickness and certainty that he'd like a gentleman's
dressing kit.
Superficially, none of the contents served a practical purpose for someone with Merrick's
physical limitations.
But as with any gift, it's the thought that counts.
Merrick's biographers attest that the present was symbolic, allowing Merrick to briefly
feel as though he was really experiencing a life that he could so often only enjoy in
his imagination, a life as a man about town, respected and ordinary, with a bustling social
life without stigma or shame.
"Oh thank you, thank you my friends, thank you!"
Relegated to life as a sideshow attraction, Merrick spent far more time having people
gawk at his head than being appreciated for what was inside it.
In fact, Dr. Treves initially diagnosed Merrick as an imbecile because his condition kept
him from speaking like a normal person.
During his days at the London Hospital, people saw what Merrick was capable of, and walked
back his initially dismissive assessment of Merrick's mind.
Merrick reportedly delighted in such complex hobbies as building replicas of famous places
like the Mainz Cathedral.
He was also a writer who composed prose and poems.
He had a particular fondness for the Isaac Watts poem False Greatness which contained
certain lines that he could surely relate to:
"Tis true my form is something odd / But blaming me is blaming God..."
"Could I create myself anew / I would not fail in pleasing you..."
It's also easy to imagine that he especially related to the poem's ending line:
"The mind's the standard of the man."
Today, Joseph Merrick's bones reside in a private room at the Queen Mary University
medical school.
There, Merrick's remains serve as an object of analysis and contemplation for doctors
and students, who can view his remains at a curator's discretion.
In 2016, critics of the bones' preservation as medical curiosities called for Merrick's
remains to be given a proper burial.
Valerie Howkins, whose grandfather Tom Norman worked as a manager for Merrick, lamented
the fate of Merrick's physical form, saying,
"It's just so sad that he had his flesh stripped from his bones and has been mounted in a glass
cabinet for 120 years against his will."
However, the medical school disagreed with critics' calls, and maintained that Merrick
had expected his body to be preserved after his death.
The journey of Merrick's bones continued in 1987, when a secretary from the London Hospital
Medical College confirmed that none other than Michael Jackson bid $500,000 for Merrick's
skeleton, a bid which the college declined to follow-up on.
The King of Pop had however previously received permission to view the bones, a privileged
act which even some medical doctors can't freely do.
Not taking no for an answer, Jackson upped his offer for the remains to $1 million, which
Jackson's manager Frank DiLeo confirmed.
Despite reports that the singer wanted to exploit Merrick's bones, Delio insisted that
wasn't the case.
However, the book Michael Jackson: Grasping the Spectacle argued that Jackson orchestrated
a P.T.
Barnum-esque ploy to promote himself as a Joseph Merrick-like character living under
sideshow-like scrutiny.
Perhaps tellingly, he told Oprah he cried while watching the 1980 film The Elephant
Man because he "saw [himself] in the story."
Moreover, the Grammy Award-winning video for Jackson's "Leave Me Alone" features the singer
dancing with a stylized rendering of Merrick's" skeleton, which sports an elephant skull.
Admitted to London Hospital in 1886, Merrick would grapple with rapidly failing health.
Meanwhile, Whitechapel's other residents would confront a very different sickness in the
form of Jack the Ripper.
The notorious serial killer murdered five women in or near Whitechapel, per History.
While Merrick's bones went to the Queen Mary of London's University medical school, and
a sample of flesh was kept for medical testing and study, his other remains mostly went unaccounted
for.
Merrick biographer Joanne Vigor-Mungovin claimed to have unearthed his location in 2019 after
searching cemetery and crematorium records.
Vigor-Mungovin alleged that Merrick's final resting place was not his own, but actually
something called a common grave, shared with the remains of other people.
According to the biographer, Merrick had that grave in common with Mary Anne Nichols and
Katherine Eddowes, both of whom fell victim to Jack the Ripper.
If true, Vigor-Mungovin's discovery could be seen as adding a bit of a bleak layer to
Merrick's already grim life.
But the author saw it as a source of solace, noting that Merrick would have wanted a Christian
burial.
It appears that at least part of him may have gotten it.
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